NVIDIA Beat Everything Except Its Own Stock Price

Wall Street got a flawless report card from the most important AI company and immediately sold it.

Think about that.

Wall Street discovered something this week.

Record-breaking earnings can taste like lukewarm oatmeal when the market's already ordered the lobster.

The S&P 500 dropped 0.4%. The Nasdaq shed 1.0%. The Dow lost 1.3%. The pattern read like an emotional EKG: panic Monday, dip-buying Tuesday and Wednesday, NVIDIA's "beat-and-drop" Thursday, then a Friday PPI print that landed like a cold shower at a pool party.

Bonds rallied all month. The 10-year Treasury hit 3.96%. Lowest close of the year.

Equities couldn't hold a bid when it mattered.

The data said one thing. Price action said another. The average investor just wanted someone to tell them which one to believe.

Nobody did. Welcome to 2026.

Let's start with the damage report.

Leadership is rotating. The Nasdaq is down for the year. Mid-caps and small-caps are outperforming. The mega-cap darlings that defined the last two years are being passed over.

Think about that next time someone tells you to just buy the index.

Underneath the surface, the real story: defensive sectors quietly had their best week in months. Utilities +2.9%. Consumer staples +2.7%. Healthcare +2.1%. Meanwhile, information technology dropped 2.2%, and financials fell 2.0%.

Treasury yields collapsed to their lowest levels of 2026. The 2-year at 3.38%. The 10-year at 3.96%.

The bond market is pricing economic deceleration. The inflation data says "not so fast."

Something has to give. It hasn't yet.

To understand Monday, rewind to the prior Friday.

The Supreme Court dropped a 6-3 ruling in Learning Resources, Inc. v. Trump that struck down the president's ability to levy tariffs under IEEPA. About 60% of imposed tariffs were invalidated. Up to $175 billion in potential refunds: now winding through trade courts in D.C.

Markets cheered. Briefly.

By Monday morning, the hole was patched. Trump jacked the Section 122 global tariff rate from 10% to 15%. Threatened additional duties on anyone who dared renegotiate existing trade deals. The EU announced it was pausing its trade agreement review within hours.

Politico reported Congress won't have the votes to extend Section 122 past 150 days.

Translation: Investors are pricing a tariff regime that is legally unstable, politically unpredictable, and held together with executive orders and executive improvisation.

That's not a policy. That's improv.

Markets reacted immediately and mercilessly. S&P -1.0%. Dow -1.7%. The iShares GS Software ETF plunged 4.7% in a single session.

IBM lost 13.1%. Why? Anthropic's Claude can now automate COBOL modernization. The digital equivalent of telling an entire generation of enterprise software engineers that a robot just learned their secret handshake. "Vibecoding" stopped being a theoretical buzzword. It started feeling like an eviction notice for the entire enterprise software stack.

The contagion spread fast:

Spoiler: Tuesday changed the story. Anthropic announced enterprise partnerships with the very companies investors spent Monday convinced it would destroy. Salesforce. FactSet. DocuSign.

Collaboration over carnage. The software space exhaled. S&P reclaimed 0.8%. The Software ETF bounced 1.9%.

AMD rocketed 8.8% after a landmark multi-year deal to deploy up to 6 gigawatts of custom AI chips with Meta. Meta is paying partly in AMD stock. About 160 million shares. Roughly 10% of the company.

Critics called it "circular financing." They're not wrong. Companies investing in suppliers who use the proceeds to buy more product, potentially inflating the very AI bubble everyone is pretending is a market. But sure. Carry on.

PayPal surged 6.7% on reports that Stripe is considering acquiring it. In 2026, even the disruptors are getting disrupted. No one is safe. Not even the ones who disrupted first.

Tuesday evening: Trump's State of the Union. The headline that mattered: "We have an old grid. It could never handle the kind of numbers... So I'm telling them they can build their own plant."

Utilities were already the week's best-performing sector. Now you know why.

Consumer confidence: 91.2 vs. 86.0 expected. Households feel cautiously better.

The Friday PPI would like a word about that.

The market knew NVIDIA was reporting after the bell. So it behaved itself.

S&P +0.8%. Nasdaq +1.3%. AppLovin +7.3%. Salesforce +3.4%.

Coinbase surged 13.5% after announcing plans to expand into stock trading. When you're a crypto exchange and crypto is having its worst month since the 2022 collapse, you diversify into whatever's still standing. Bitcoin rallied 8% back to $70,000. Nine lives, minimum.

Then, Wednesday night: NVIDIA.

Revenue: +74% year-over-year. Data center revenue: Record. +75% YoY. 13x since ChatGPT launched. Net income: +35%. Q1 guidance: $78 billion. Consensus beat.

Jensen Huang declared: "The agentic AI inflection point has arrived."

The stock briefly popped in after-hours.

By Thursday morning, it was down 5.5%. Down nearly 7% for the week.

Let's review.

NVIDIA beat every metric. Guided higher. The CEO announced a historic industry inflection on live television. The stock fell.

Here's the question: If the most important company in AI can post generational earnings and still get sold, what exactly does this trade need to go higher?

No clean answer exists. That's the problem.

Broadcom: -3.2%. AMD: -3.4%. PHLX Semiconductor Index: -3.2%. DeepSeek reportedly withheld its latest AI model from U.S. chipmakers. Geopolitics as a feature, not a bug.

Meanwhile: Salesforce. Cautious guidance. Still jumped 4% Thursday. Agentforce crossed $800 million in ARR. Benioff reaffirmed a path to $63 billion in annual revenue by FY2030. Shares are down 25% year-to-date. The question has shifted from "is AI killing software?" to "is the damage already priced in?"

Jensen Huang told CNBC that "markets were wrong about AI's threat to software companies." A chip CEO publicly defending software companies. A parent breaking up a fight between siblings.

Workday. Snowflake. The broader SaaS cohort: all recovered. Software ETF +2.2% Thursday, even as chipmakers were still on the floor.

Stellantis also reported Thursday. Massive full-year loss on a $26 billion EV-related charge. CEO Antonio Filosa admitted the company "overestimated the pace of the energy transition." Second-half results showed 10% revenue improvement. Shares +3%.

Tesla's European sales fell 17% while China's BYD kept soaring. The EV recalibration is no longer a punchline. It's a reckoning.

Block cut 40% of its workforce to automate with AI. Stock surged 16.8%.

C3.ai slashed 26% of its staff. The CEO essentially admitted the company failed to deliver on its promises. Which is at least honest.

Goldman Sachs strategists warned AI-fueled layoffs could meaningfully raise the 2026 unemployment rate.

The market's response to all of this: bullish.

Translation: Firing humans to replace them with software is a positive catalyst. Get comfortable with that sentence. It's not going away.

Apollo Global plunged 8.6% after the collapse of UK mortgage firm Market Financial Solutions added fuel to private equity concerns. Goldman Sachs dropped 7.4%. Financials: -2.0% for the week.

Then the PPI arrived.

January wholesale inflation: +0.5% vs. +0.3% consensus. Core PPI: +0.8% vs. +0.3% expected.

That's not a miss. That's a slap.

Polymarket odds for a March Fed cut: 3%. June: 45%. Whatever was left of the rate-cut thesis for spring: nuked.

This wasn't happening in a vacuum. PCE Core Inflation already crept to 3.0% YoY. Q4 2025 GDP printed 1.4% annualized against a 2.9% consensus.

Low growth. Hot inflation. February Chicago PMI at a blistering 57.7 vs. 52.5 expected.

No one wants to say the word. The data isn't waiting for permission.

Oil rose to $67.06 per barrel on Friday. Up 2.8% on the week. Trump told reporters he's "not happy" with U.S.-Iran negotiations. Energy stocks gained 2.0% for the week.

On the other side, sub-$3 national gas prices are squeezing domestic producers to the breaking point. Exxon and Chevron posted year-on-year profit declines. One Dallas Fed operator put it plainly: "Decreasing oil prices are making many of our firm's wells uneconomic."

Oil is up 15% since January. Almost entirely Iran premium, not demand.

That's a brittle foundation. Enjoy that trade.

Netflix decided not to raise its bid for Warner Bros. Discovery. Paramount Skydance wins. PSKY: +20.8%.

Paramount paid Warner Bros. a $2.8 billion termination fee. The corporate equivalent of buying out your lease early because you found a nicer apartment.

Netflix surged 13.8% on the news. The market rewarded walking away from what would have been a regulatory and operational nightmare.

Filing that one under: sometimes the best deal is the one you don't do.

Dell jumped 21.8% after posting strong earnings and reminding investors that not every hardware story revolves around NVIDIA. Also this week: NVIDIA expects its gaming chip shortage to persist through year-end and announced a $30 billion investment in OpenAI.

Make it make sense.

Nobody talks about Walmart. Everyone uses Walmart.

Latest earnings: $26 billion in capex for 2025, up $3 billion year-over-year, with most of it in tech and fulfillment. A new $30 billion stock buyback. Double-digit e-commerce growth at both Walmart US and Sam's Club.

Same-day delivery is now the norm. Moving from 2-day to 1-day delivery produces what CFO John David Rainey calls "an appreciable increase in conversion."

Walmart rebounded 2.3% Monday, even as the broader market fell apart.

A $1 trillion market cap running quietly in the background while AI stocks steal the headlines.

Greg Abel's first Berkshire Hathaway annual letter drops Saturday. Read it carefully.

The prediction markets are painting a picture of resilience with serious tail risk.

That last one is the tell. A bimodal distribution. Either things keep growing or they fall off a cliff.

The betting markets see a Fed in no rush, inflation that refuses to die quietly, and an economy that probably survives — with a tail risk it doesn't.

A 26% recession probability is not a rounding error. Price it accordingly.

Gold: ~$5,247/oz. Up ~1% on the week. Up 83.6% from a year ago.

February 2025: gold was $2,876. It has nearly doubled in the past 12 months.

Central bank buying is the structural bid underneath the entire move. The U.S.-Iran geopolitical premium has only thickened after Trump expressed dissatisfaction with nuclear negotiations. JPMorgan raised its year-end 2026 target to $6,300/oz. The January all-time high: $5,608.

In a week where equities struggled, inflation ran hot, and geopolitical risk stayed elevated, gold did exactly what gold does.

Sat there looking expensive and feeling essential.

You're welcome.

Mortgage rates broke below 6% for the first time since September 2022. 30-year fixed: 5.98% per Freddie Mac.

Psychological milestone. It matters. A 0.25% reduction lets buyers afford 2.5% more home at the same monthly payment. An estimated 5 million additional households now qualify compared to a year ago.

Don't pop the champagne yet.

Lowe's cautious guidance hammered homebuilder stocks. Lennar: -4.9%. Home Depot's CFO described the housing market as "frozen." FHFA Housing Price Index: +0.1% vs. +0.4% expected. Case-Shiller: 1.4% YoY.

Refinancing activity: up 130% year-over-year. Purchase applications: up 8%.

Here's what that means: people who own homes are refinancing. People who want to buy homes still can't find inventory.

The spring market arrives with lower rates as a tailwind and a "frozen" supply picture as the headwind. The door is cracked open. It is not swung wide.

Two movies. Same theater.

On one screen: the "buy the dip" crowd showed up Tuesday and Wednesday to scoop beaten-down software names. Coinbase and Robinhood rallied hard on news of crypto enthusiasm and retail trading expansion.

On the other screen: Goldman Sachs strategists flagged a "buy signal" amid elevated investor hedging. Smart money is adding protection while retail chases the bounce.

Social media sentiment swung from AI doom Monday to cautious optimism midweek, then snapped back to anxiety after the PPI print and Block's mass layoffs.

A week that felt like scrolling through five different emotional timelines simultaneously.

That's not volatility. That's a market that doesn't yet know what it believes.

This week's market tasted like a beautifully plated omakase dinner, with half the courses arriving cold.

The ingredients were undeniably premium. Record NVIDIA earnings. Historic mortgage rate lows. Gold near $5,250.

The execution left something to be desired. Like a Michelin-starred chef who forgot to turn on the oven for the main course.

What lingers on the palate: the aftertaste of inflation. That hot PPI print was the wasabi you weren't expecting. It cleared the sinuses of anyone who thought rate cuts were a done deal.

The bill arrived. Nobody agreed on who was paying.

Here's the central tension heading into March 2026.

The economy is producing impressive numbers. Earnings are strong. Manufacturing is humming. Consumer confidence beat. Housing is cracking open.

But wholesale inflation is running at more than double the expected pace. GDP came in at half the consensus needed. The AI trade has entered a phase in which creating value and eliminating jobs are two sides of the same coin. And the market is rewarding both without apparent moral discomfort.

The S&P 500 finished February up 0.5% year-to-date. Barely. Its 50-day moving average: both magnet and trapdoor. Treasuries had their best month of the year. Gold stayed elevated. The rotation from mega-cap growth into defensives and mid-caps remained the most reliable trade of 2026.

The week didn't break anything. Didn't fix anything either.

It just reminded everyone that, in a market this complex, the most honest answer is often the least satisfying.

Could go either way, honestly.