Nvidia beat big. The bond market still sets the tone.
Nvidia guided to $108 billion and S&P futures rose 0.3%. Salesforce jumped 12.7% after hours. Sticky PCE and a 4.65% 10-year explain the gap.
Nvidia reported the quarter the AI trade wanted — revenue up 106% and guidance $4 billion above consensus — and S&P 500 futures responded by rising 0.3%. That gap between the news and the tape is the most useful thing on the screen this morning, and the explanation is in the bond market rather than the earnings release.
Nvidia delivered, and the index shrugged
Nvidia’s fiscal Q2 brought revenue of $96.2 billion, up 106% year over year, and earnings of $2.22 per share. The guide mattered more: roughly $108 billion for the current quarter, plus or minus 2%, against analyst expectations near $104.2 billion — and management noted that outlook assumes no data center sales in China at all. Gross margin held at 75% for a second straight quarter, with the company guiding to 74% next quarter. On the call, CEO Jensen Huang pointed to about 70% revenue growth for the fiscal year ending January 2028, well above what analysts had modelled.
Our feed shows the stock at $219.53 in after-hours trade against a $209.95 close, a gain of 4.6%. The regular session had gone the other way — Nvidia fell 1.6% on Wednesday, one of the weaker large caps ahead of its own print.
What did not follow is the index. S&P 500 e-mini futures were up around 0.3%. In Asia, the Nikkei 225 fell 0.3% while South Korea’s Kospi rose 1.5%, paring earlier gains after the Bank of Korea raised rates 25 basis points to 3%. Europe’s STOXX 600 was down about 0.1% even as the region’s technology sector rose 1.3%. The read-through is narrow: chip and AI-infrastructure names are getting the benefit, and very little else is.
Salesforce was the larger single-name move
The bigger after-hours move was Salesforce, which our feed prices at $232.32 against a $206.11 close — up 12.7%. Fiscal Q2 revenue came in at $11.345 billion, up about 10.8% year over year, and the company lifted its full-year revenue outlook to $46.1–46.4 billion from $45.9–46.2 billion. Alongside the numbers it announced an expanded partnership with Anthropic that brings Salesforce data and a set of pre-built sales skills into Claude.
Worth being precise about the sequence: Salesforce closed Wednesday’s regular session essentially unchanged, down 0.03%. The entire move happened after the bell, so nothing in Wednesday’s closing price reflects these results.
The bond market is the actual constraint
Wednesday’s data is why a blowout guide buys only 0.3% in futures. July PCE — the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge — rose 0.2% on the month against expectations of 0.1%, and 3.7% year over year against a 3.6% forecast, with core at 3.3%. Durable goods orders rose 1.1% versus 0.5% expected. Q2 GDP came in at 1.5%. Inflation is not behaving, and growth is not weak enough to force the Fed’s hand the other way.
The 10-year Treasury yield sat near 4.65% on Wednesday, off the 20-month high of 4.75% reached on August 21 but still elevated. Futures markets, per the CME FedWatch tool, put the odds of a September rate hike at about 38%, and a hike by year end at roughly 73%. That is the number worth sitting with: the market’s base case is tightening, not easing. The Dow lost 113.52 points, or 0.21%, to 53,463.88, ending a three-day winning streak.
Wednesday’s internals: a flat tape hiding a rotation
The index level was almost perfectly still — SPY finished +0.02%, QQQ +0.09%, VTI +0.02%. Underneath, the dispersion was wide, and it sorted along interest-rate lines rather than AI lines.
Higher: Arm +3.93%, Oracle +2.84%, Palantir +2.76%, Cloudflare +2.63%, Datadog +2.10%, CrowdStrike +2.05%, Qualcomm +1.97%. Lower: Reddit −4.36%, Roblox −3.99%, Eli Lilly −3.59%, Robinhood −3.17%, Coinbase −2.87%. Long-duration and speculative names took the damage while established enterprise software held up — a pattern consistent with the yield backdrop, not with anything specific to those businesses.
Healthcare was weak as a group, with the sector ETF XLV down 1.00%, Lilly −3.59%, Merck −2.14%, Abbott −1.75% and Johnson & Johnson −1.15%. Gold’s proxy GLD fell 1.58% to $421.32, which is what a market repricing toward higher-for-longer rates tends to do to a non-yielding asset.
One move worth flagging as a caution: Meta opened at $590.44, traded as high as $593.27, fell as low as $561.95, and closed at $576.14 — up 1.07% on the day, but having surrendered most of a gap that at the open was worth around 3.6%. A green close there disguises a session of steady selling.
What to watch today
- Initial jobless claims, 8:30am ET
- July wholesale inventories (preliminary), 8:30am ET
- The Jackson Hole symposium opens today and runs through August 29. Kevin Warsh’s first keynote as Fed Chair is tomorrow, Friday, at 10:00am ET — not today
- Marvell reports after the close, with the call at 4:45pm ET. Its 4.4% after-hours gain on Wednesday was sympathy with Nvidia, not its own numbers
- How much of Nvidia’s 4.6% after-hours gain survives the cash open, and whether the move broadens past semis and AI infrastructure
- Whether Salesforce’s raise lifts enterprise software peers, after Oracle +2.84% and Datadog +2.10% on Wednesday
Not financial advice. iTrading Buddy summarizes publicly available market data and news; every figure above is sourced from the reporting available before the US open on the date shown. Verify anything you act on.