Market Report for Monday, September 22, 2025
Stocks floated higher like an overinflated pool toy: buoyant, oblivious, one sharp rock away from deflation. Wall Street rolled the dice again today. Records were extended, AI was canonized, and the Fed recited its usual contradictory haikus.
Level Change 9/22/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
+0.1 Dow
+0.7 Nasdaq
+0.6 Nasdaq 100
+0.4 S&P 500
-0.1 S&P 400
+0.2 S&P 600
The stock market now treats new highs the way TikTok treats dance challenges: repetitive and impossible to stop watching.
With megatech cracking the whip, the Dow, S&P, and Nasdaq all extended Friday’s records, each grinning like overeager valedictorians. Small caps tried sneaking into the club but got carded at the door.
Apple (AAPL +4.3%) and Nvidia (NVDA +4%) strutted.
The iPhone maker asked suppliers to crank up model 17 production by 30–40%, signaling more aluminum rectangles for the faithful, each capable of taking better photos of the same lunch.
Nvidia decided to spend $100B propping up OpenAI. That doesn’t just move the needle; it replaces the entire gauge with a gold-plated superintelligence dial. The plan is to build Nvidia-chipped data centers drawing 10 gigawatts of power, which sounds less like cloud infrastructure and more like Doc Brown’s recipe for time travel. Whatever it takes to animate our brave new world of stochastic parrots.
As the civilizational inflection point turns, Fedspeak plays its usual parlor game of “No, What I Meant,” talking dovish while stomping around in hawk talons. See if you can make sense of today’s lineup:
- Atlanta’s Bostic grudgingly penciled in only one rate cut for the year, citing inflation, apparently counting the one they already did.
- Governor Miran, on loan from the White House, thinks rates should be two points lower. He hasn’t received President Trump’s NIRP dreams yet.
- St. Louis’s Musalem and Cleveland’s Hammack played the bad cops, warning against too much easing, too soon. Miran’s off their play date list.
- Richmond’s Barkin noted tariffs aren’t hurting consumers much. The peasants aren’t yet rioting, so carry on.
Investors shrugged off the dissonance because, frankly, tech chatter makes better bedtime stories than inflation risk, which remains Wall Street’s answer to NyQuil.
Oracle (ORCL +6.3%) is in talks with Meta (META -1.6%) about a $20B cloud deal. That used to be considered a lot of money.
Elsewhere in tech, the White House promised an Americanized TikTok, starring Dell, Fox, and Oracle. Six of seven board seats go to Americans, about 80% of the app to US firms, with less than 20% for ByteDance and its Chinese backers left clutching the kids’ table.
Finally, from our Hurray for the Republic file: free speech caught a bid.
Disney will reinstate “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” tomorrow, after yanking it last week under pressure from the Trump administration, station owners, and conservative critics. Turns out even gallows humor is covered under the First Amendment’s group plan.
— Jason Kelly
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Free gets you the ping. Paid gets you the pong. For the whole match—and the pigeon—upgrade now.
