Nvidia soared, then the Fed spoke

1. 01

   Nvidia beat, and rose 8.7% in a day

   Nvidia reported results on Wednesday, beat expectations, and the shares jumped 8.7%. The company is now large enough that this alone lifted the indexes it belongs to.

   The number that moved people was not the profit it had already made. It was the forecast: chief financial officer Colette Kress told investors the company expects revenue growth of about 70% in its 2028 financial year, a year that does not even begin until February 2027.

   That is worth pausing on. Investors bid the shares up almost 9% on a projection about a period more than a year away, which tells you what a share price actually is. It is not a measure of what a company has done. It is a running bet on what it will do.

2. 02

   Then the Fed chair spoke, and changed the question

   On Friday, Fed chair Kevin Warsh spoke at the central bank's annual gathering in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. He was not reassuring about inflation.

   His words were careful and the market heard them clearly: "While this summer's PCE and CPI readings were better than expected, they do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved." In plain English, he was saying the recent good inflation numbers had not convinced him.

   Before he spoke, traders put the odds of the Fed leaving rates alone in September at roughly 70%. By the following Monday the odds of a rise had jumped to about 66%, close to double where they had been. One speech, no new data, and the expected path of borrowing costs turned around.

3. 03

   The word that changed was "cut" to "rise"

   For most of the past two years the argument was about how quickly rates would come down. This week the argument became whether they are about to go up.

   That reframing matters more than the size of any single move. Higher rates make safe government bonds pay more, so shares have to compete against a better risk-free alternative, and anything bought on borrowed money becomes more expensive to hold.

   We set out the mechanism in Why interest rates move everything. The point that week was that rates are the gravity the whole market operates under. This week the market spent five days re-pricing which direction that gravity is about to pull.

4. 04

   The biggest seven did the lifting

   The S&P 500 rose 0.5% on the week, the Nasdaq 0.9% and the Dow 0.5%. It was the first winning week in three. Underneath, the gain was not evenly earned.

   The seven largest technology companies rose 2.2% between them, which was most of the reason the indexes finished green at all. When a handful of enormous companies move together, they can carry an index that the majority of its members did not help.

   This is the weighting problem in practice. An index tracks the weighted average of its members, so the giants speak far louder than the rest, and "the market went up" can mean a small number of very large companies went up.

5. 05

   A winning week that ended badly

   Despite the weekly gain, Friday itself was ugly for technology. The Nasdaq slid 0.52% on the day, dragged down by chipmakers including Nvidia and Intel.

   Nvidia is the clearest example of how quickly the story turns. The same shares that jumped almost 9% on Wednesday were among the names pulling the index down on Friday, because Warsh had changed what investors thought money would cost.

   Chipmakers are especially sensitive to that. Their value rests heavily on profits expected years ahead, and the higher rates go, the less those distant profits are worth in today's money.

6. 06

   August finished up, and that is the part to remember

   The month closed with the S&P 500 up about 2.6%, the Nasdaq up 3.9% and the Dow up 1.3%. It was the S&P's fourth monthly gain out of five.

   Almost none of that is visible from inside the individual weeks. August contained a bond sell-off that knocked shares down, a blockbuster earnings report that pushed them up, and a hawkish speech that pulled them back again.

   Zoom out one level and it reads as a decent month. Zoom in and it reads as chaos. Both descriptions are accurate, which is precisely why the timeframe someone chooses tells you as much as the number they quote.

Figures cover the week ending 30 August 2026 and are sourced from public reporting. Educational content, not financial advice. A new recap goes up every week, and on @wealthstratum.