Nvidia Buys Back Its Stock While Everything Else Gets Sold
The weekend did nothing for anyone. Late Friday, President Trump rejected Iran’s seven-day ceasefire proposal, with reports that he’s told aides he expects to resume strikes after the November midterms, and Monday’s open took that personally. Oil ripped, with Brent pushing toward $110 intraday before backing off; the 10-year Treasury yield blew through 5.25%, and Friday’s rally was erased before most people finished their first coffee. The Dow closed down 0.67% at 51,481, the S&P 500 lost 0.77% to 7,683, the NDX dropped 1.08% to 26,820, and the Russell 2000 fell 0.69% to 2,818. The S&P spent most of the session pinned around 7,700, as if it were waiting for someone to tell it what to do. Nobody did.
The headline losses look manageable. The internals don’t. The Nasdaq logged 50 new 52-week highs against 461 new lows, and the NYSE was even uglier at 16 highs versus 422 lows. That’s not a pullback in the generals; that’s the infantry getting routed while the index heavyweights hold the line. Energy and consumer defensives were the only real shelter, while consumer cyclicals and communication services took the worst of it. Gold got smoked for nearly 4%, which tells you this was a rates story more than a fear story. The market is now openly pricing in the possibility of another Fed hike, potentially as soon as October, and oil at these levels continues to feed that inflation narrative. Banks slid too, with AI now getting blamed for deposit cost pressure, because apparently AI is responsible for everything now, including your checking account.
Nvidia was the lone adult in the room. The company boosted its buyback by $150 billion, bringing total authorization to $235 billion, the largest in U.S. history, and NVDA closed up roughly 2%. It also launched a new AI safety guardrails platform. Here’s the catch: the rest of the chip complex didn’t get the memo. Semis led the tech lower, with Intel and AMD both selling off, and the group that carried last week’s AI rally was the first to be sold when yields spiked. When NVDA is green and the SOX is bleeding, that’s rotation into the one name with a fortress balance sheet, not a healthy tape.
The day’s biggest bloodbath was MongoDB (MDB). CEO CJ Desai walked out, effective immediately, to become Meta’s Chief Enterprise Platform Officer, leading its new enterprise AI push, and MDB got cut by roughly a fifth. Meta didn’t exactly celebrate its new hire either, falling about 4% as the market weighed the cost of an enterprise platform launch.
Looking ahead, we’ve got quarter-end on Wednesday, which could put a floor under the megacaps, and the jobs report at the end of the week, which could make or break theFed-hikee narrative. The Nasdaq is only about 1.6% off last Tuesday’s record close, so the damage at the index level is still shallow. But the breadth is screaming, and until oil and yields back off, the path of least resistance is lower for everything not named Nvidia. Stay nimble, keep size light, and don’t try to be a hero catching knives in semis.
The Big Kahuna, though, is MU, which reports Wednesday after the close. Huge for memory, chips, AI, and tech in general.
Have a great night; see you in the Discord in the morning.