Good morning and welcome to today's market chronicle. It's Thursday, May 21, 2026. Nvidia just reported the most astonishing quarter in the history of American capitalism, and the stock fell.
Let that sentence breathe.
Overnight, the AI chip deity delivered revenue of $81.6 billion, up 85% from a year ago, with data center revenue at $75.2 billion, up 92%, and guided the next quarter at $91 billion. The board authorized an $80 billion buyback and raised the dividend from one cent to twenty-five cents per share. Twenty-five times. A display of corporate munificence so theatrical it belongs in a Vegas residency. And the stock dipped about one percent in after-hours. Because of course. We are now in the era where beating by thirty percent is priced in, and anything short of levitation is merely in-line. In market-speak, that means Jensen Huang could announce he personally soldered every chip by candlelight and the algos would shrug and move on.
But everyone is pretending not to notice the philosophical absurdity. S&P 500 futures sit near 7,432, barely changed, as though Nvidia's results were a quiet beat from a midsize regional insurer. We have normalized miracle-making in the wonderful world of finance. The singularity has been priced in. Now we are waiting for the singularity to beat the whisper number.
Meanwhile, Intuit cut 3,000 employees, seventeen percent of its workforce, signed deals with Anthropic and OpenAI, guided higher, and watched its stock fall thirteen percent after hours. It is now down forty percent this year. Translation: we fired the humans, hired the algorithms, wrote up the guidance, and somehow this is not enough. The canary died. They brought in a parrot. The parrot is also struggling.
Today, all eyes fall on Walmart before the open, which will tell us whether the American consumer is still functioning on habit and store-brand pasta. Workday reports after the bell. We also get jobless claims, housing data, and manufacturing prints in the morning, which will be parsed carefully and then ignored in favor of whatever Walmart's management says about pantry depletion trends in the Midwest. The Federal Reserve will watch from a distance, expressionless, as is tradition.
Levels: gold around $4,700 per ounce, for anyone still nervous, and there is always someone still nervous. WTI crude at $98.77, because somewhere between a trade truce and a ceasefire oil decided ninety-nine dollars was its spiritual home. Bitcoin around $77,852, down on the week, fear and greed index firmly in fear, which is simply Bitcoin's natural resting face. S&P 500 futures near 7,432. The ten-year yield at approximately 4.69%, which is almost exactly where it was the day Moody's downgraded the United States a year ago. Make of that what you will.
Have a good one.