Market Report for Thursday, September 25, 2025
Markets drifted lower today like a wedding band on its third soggy encore. Washington rehearsed its favorite pantomime, shutdown brinkmanship, while Fedsters lobbed wet blankets over the dance floor. Enthusiasm for rate cuts has wilted…
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Market Report for Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Markets spent today as tired and anxious as a hungover trust fund kid, vaguely offended by reality. Stocks slid for the second straight day, oil kept climbing, gold sulked, and the Fed wheezed into its microphone about “careful pacing.”
Level Change 9/24/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
-0.4 Dow
-0.3 Nasdaq
-0.3 Nasdaq 100
-0.3 S&P 500
-0.8 S&P 400
-0.9 S&P 600
The great “everything rally” took another smoke break.
After record highs on Monday, stocks looked bored and queasy at once. The Dow slipped 0.4%, the S&P 0.3%, and small caps were left bleeding in the alley with nearly a full point lopped off. Even gold, usually the bad-news belle, lost its sparkle—down 1.3%, tiara in the ashtray.
Oil gave economic naysayers something to nay about, strutting 4% higher this week. Blame the never-one-to-change-his-mind President Trump, who suddenly swapped pals from Vladimir to Volodymyr, sartorial choices notwithstanding. Go Ukraine. Show NATO a thing or two.
Investors have circled two things on their calendars:
Friday’s core PCE, the Fed’s favorite inflation yardstick; and quarter-end, with Goldman warning pensions could dump $22B in equities. “Largest flows in years,” they warned. Brace for selling, says the bank that said to brace for recession, again, and again.
In AIville, Micron bragged about 30% quarter-on-quarter high-bandwidth-memory revenue growth, an $8B run rate, and sold-out 2026 capacity. Traders rewarded it with a 2.8% nosedive, grumbling something about a high bar into the print.
Across the Pacific, Alibaba found investor religion by pledging $50B more in AI spend and unveiling Qwen3-Max, a large language model, not a droid in Mos Eisley. Shares jumped 8.2%.
The Silicon Valley Lazarus occasionally known as Intel angled for another AI-linked sugar daddy—Apple this time—after last week’s $5B Nvidia infusion. The stock jumped 6.4%, proving hope is the strongest chip.
Rates ticked higher too, courtesy of Oracle, which is about to borrow $15B from bond buyers to chase cloud-AI dreams; and the Chicago Fed’s Goolsbee, who warned against “overly frontloaded cuts.” You’ll get your easing, kids, just not before Daddy finishes his stagflation lecture.
The pièce de résistance, courtesy of the Ministry of Making America China, was Lithium Americas, up an absurd 95.8% after the Energy Department baited its state capitalism hook with a “potential” 10% ownership stake. Alas, no fresh money, just an IOU on cash already promised last year. Washington gets a free slice, retail holders get diluted, and everyone applauds America’s pretend EV supply chain. Comrade!
— Jason Kelly
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Market Report for Tuesday, September 23, 2025
Stocks stumbled today, megatech limping like a greyhound after a night at the track. Breadth was positive, indicating the small fry didn’t drown quite as fast as the whales. From the Zen riddler lectern, Powell reprised his comments from last week, and in the Q&A, discovered valuations.
Level Change 9/23/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
-0.2 Dow
-1.0 Nasdaq
-0.7 Nasdaq 100
-0.6 S&P 500
-0.1 S&P 400
-0.2 S&P 600
Wall Street pulled a muscle.
After yesterday’s buoyant romp, the market remembered gravity, with the Nasdaq shedding a full point while Nvidia and Amazon played ballast in the wrong hot-air balloon. Equal-weight S&P beat its cap-weighted cousin, proof that when the giants sneeze, the runts don’t always catch pneumonia.
The day’s story was less “panic in the streets” and more “fine, let’s try defensive ETFs for a change.” Gold glittered, Treasuries inched higher, and utilities got a pat on the head.
On the geopolitical stage, President Trump turned the UN into open-mic night. Yesterday NATO-skeptic, today Ukraine’s hype man, he said Kyiv could reclaim lost land and maybe tack on some Russian acreage. Asked if he thinks NATO should shoot down Russian planes, he answered: “Yes, I do.”
Back in Powell-land, the Fed chair unfurled his thesaurus of dampened enthusiasm. Growth is “moderating,” housing “weak,” spending “slowing.” Risks are “two-sided.” Last week’s quarter-point cut, he insisted, was not “aggressive easing” but “risk management,” as if rebranding stops Wall Street from pawing his leg. And equity prices? “Fairly highly valued.” Bears likened that to calling the Hindenburg “somewhat flammable.”
Across the table, Fed Governor and Trump standard-bearer Bowman shouted from the dovish bleachers: cut now or fall “behind the curve.” Chicago’s Goolsbee put neutral a good 100-125 bp below the current rate but warned against swinging the axe too hard lest inflation return. Atlanta’s Bostic played middle school hall monitor: risks on both sides, move along.
Nvidia, $160B richer from its OpenAI flirtation, fell 2.8% anyway. The Street is beginning to notice the circularity: Nvidia funds startups, startups buy Nvidia chips, and Jensen Huang cackles all the way to the leather-jacket rack. Bank of America called it “ecosystem investing,” like buying your own dinner and tipping yourself on the way out.
So, yes, breadth improved. But when the titans bleed, the minnows just look healthy by comparison.
— Jason Kelly
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Enjoyed today’s market misadventures? They come around often. So should you.
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:
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.
Market Report for Thursday, September 18, 2025
Wall Street performed a textbook Pavlov today: the bell rang (a Fed rate cut), and prices salivated. Megatech indexes set records, small caps turned cartwheels, and JPMorgan’s “sell the news” warning was drowned out by barking buyers.
Level Change 9/18/25 (%)
– – – – – – – – – – – – – – –
+0.3 Dow
+0.9 Nasdaq
+1.0 Nasdaq 100
+0.5 S&P 500
+1.3 S&P 400
+2.3 S&P 600
The “don’t fight the Fed” reflex fired as usual, with an extra shot for the little guys.
Small caps, those scrappy wannabes hooked on credit, were the day’s showboats as yesterday’s cut lowered the cost of oxygen. The Russell 2000 cracked its November 2021 record, and our preferred S&P 600 surged 2.3%. When policy turns easier, the dinghies rise first.
Economic signals obligingly played along.
Initial jobless claims dropped to 231K, better than the 241K consensus and clear of last week’s Texas-flavored distortion, when a flood of fraudulent filings puffed weakness into the stats. Continuing claims eased to 1.920M from a revised 1.927M, also beating estimates. Call it cooling, not cracking: soft enough for the Fed to pivot, firm enough to steady the tape. Another Goldilocks print, to the bears’ dismay.
Manufacturing chipped in with its own feel-good subplot. The Philly Fed index jumped to 23.2 from 0.3, walloping the 3.0 consensus. New orders and shipments climbed, while prices paid and received dropped sharply—a trader’s dream formula: more activity, less inflation.
Forward-looking measures showed factories expecting growth over the next six months. If you were staging a soft landing, you’d pin this to the rehearsal mirror. “When, oh when,” the bears cry, “does our recession finally arrive?”
Tech lit some headline fireworks. Intel erupted 22.8% after Nvidia pledged a $5B stake in the struggling stalwart and a joint push into chips for PCs and data centers.
Intel gets to graft Nvidia’s GPU wizardry onto its PC lineup, while contributing CPUs to Nvidia-driven data centers. Call it co-opetition with benefits: Nvidia diversifies supply and product hooks; Intel gets a credibility injection. Nvidia added 3.5%, proving even kings enjoy a good alliance when it deepens the moat.
So yes, the market did the obvious thing after a cut. But the obvious isn’t trivial when backed by confirming data: claims normalizing, factories perking up, prices easing. Liquidity met breadth, and up went the curtain.
— Jason Kelly
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