The S&P Moved Seventeen Cents. Everything Else Waited Until After the Bell.

Four major indexes, and not one of them moved a quarter of a percent. On a day with a $17 billion legal settlement, an inflation print, and the biggest earnings report of the quarter. The tape did not shrug; it took the whole afternoon off.

The most important company in the market spent Wednesday going down. Nvidia closed at 209.66, off 1.59%, on 179.9 million shares against 122.3 million the day before, which is 1.47 times normal volume and not the behavior of a crowd feeling good about what was coming.

Then the bell rang, and the numbers landed. Revenue of $96.2 billion against the $92.5 billion analysts expected, more than double a year ago. Adjusted profit of $2.22 a share against $2.09, where "adjusted" is the number that leaves out one-time items and is the one everybody actually trades. The data center business, which is the whole company wearing a small hat, did $89 billion against an $85.8 billion estimate.

But the beat was not the story, because Nvidia beating is not news. Bloomberg counts sixteen straight quarters of it, and notes the stock still fell the day after five of its last six reports, which tells you everything about how spoiled this shareholder base is. The story was CFO Colette Kress saying the company expects about 70% revenue growth in fiscal 2028 when the street had modeled 45%, adding that "customers' forecasts point to our growth doubling next year." Guidance for this quarter came in at $108 billion, give or take 2%, above the expected $105.2 billion.

She also flagged the bill. Gross margin, the slice of each sale left after the cost of making the thing, slides to 71% to 72% by the January quarter because memory chips have gotten brutally expensive, then recovers as Nvidia passes the cost along. Which it can, because who exactly are you buying from instead? Separately, The Information reported Nvidia agreed to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, though nothing is signed, Nvidia has not confirmed it, and Business Insider says it could still fall apart.

Meta settled with 47 states for $17 billion, ending the Oakland child-safety trial we have tracked since opening arguments on August 18. The states alleged Meta built Facebook and Instagram to be addictive to kids, knew it, and said otherwise in public.

Look at how the day went, because the bar tells the story better than the headline does. Meta opened at 590.44, up 3.58%, ran to 593.27, then spent the rest of the session bleeding out to close at 576.14, up 1.07%, having touched 561.95 on the way. That is a 5.6% swing top to bottom on 3.19 times the prior day's volume, which is what it looks like when a stock gets bought on a headline and then re-priced by people who read past it.

What they read: about 30% of the money, roughly $5.3 billion, only gets released if YouTube and TikTok both adopt the same safety features (a one-hour daily limit, a nighttime block, age checks) and pay the same amount between them. So, a chunk of the headline is a bet that two competitors will volunteer to be regulated. Meta also takes a hard cap on kids' screen time, appoints an outside auditor who can phone the attorneys general directly, and again seeks an injunction against lying about its safety features.

July PCE from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the price gauge the Fed actually targets rather than the CPI number everyone quotes at dinner, came in at 3.7% year over year, versus 3.6% expected. Hot by a tenth. Core PCE, which strips out food and energy because those two move for reasons monetary policy cannot touch, held at 3.3%, exactly as forecast and exactly where it was last month. Sticky is the polite word.

Then the growth data made it worse. Q2 consumer spending got revised up to 3.4% from a first read that had it at 0.5%, personal income rose 0.4% against 0.2% expected, durable goods orders jumped 1.1% against 0.5%, and the Atlanta Fed's GDPNow, a running estimate that updates as data arrives rather than waiting for the quarter to end, leaped to 4.6% from 4.0%. An economy growing at 4.6% with inflation at 3.7% does not need help, and the Fed knows it. Three officials already voted to raise rates in July, and last week's minutes were more hawkish, meaning more worried about inflation than about jobs, than that 9-3 vote let on.

Futures agreed and moved the odds of a September hike up after the print, not down. As Morgan Stanley Wealth Management's chief economic strategist Ellen Zentner put it, the data "weren't necessarily what investors, or the Fed, wanted to see." Gold was the only thing that visibly reacted, sliding 1.58% as traders took profits ahead of Nvidia and Jackson Hole, though at +13.4% for August it can afford one bad Wednesday.

Jackson Hole opens. The Kansas City Fed hosts, which is the same Kansas City Fed whose manufacturing index prints at 10:00 AM CT (14 expected, 17 prior). Warsh keynotes Friday at 9:00 AM CT, scheduled but not formally confirmed, and it is his first as Chair.

7:30 AM CT, the labor read. Initial jobless claims from the DOL, 208,000 expected against 206,000, with continuing claims at 1.79 million. After Wednesday's growth numbers, a low claims print stops being good news and becomes another line in the hawkish column.

12:00 PM CT, the 7-year auction. The last cleared at 4.473%, and Wednesday's 5-year went off at 4.393%, so demand is holding. A sloppy 7-year would be the first real crack.

After the close, Marvell (MRVL) at $0.65 expected, plus Dollar General and Dollar Tree, which together are the closest thing to a live read on whether the consumer doing that 3.4% of spending is the same one shopping at Dollar Tree.

The one thing that could ruin everyone's day: Friday, 9:00 AM CT, when Warsh gives his first keynote as Chair at the exact minute the Michigan survey publishes one-year inflation expectations (4.3% expected, 4.3% prior). A hawkish new Chair and a household inflation reading with a 4-handle, landing simultaneously, into a market that just spent Wednesday refusing to price anything. Everything the tape declined to do this week gets done in about ninety seconds.

Follow us on X and Instagram for daily market updates

Markets don't wait, and neither do we. Follow Tracking the Trade for fast takes, the numbers that matter, and the occasional meme that hits a little too close to your portfolio.