One month, four assets
Gold's round trip dwarfs everything else on the page. Stocks barely moved by comparison.
AMD gave back 7% within the hour after its own earnings call, Palantir held onto 6.85% after fading from a bigger premarket pop, and gold jumped 6.08% the same day the House ended the government shutdown.
Gold's round trip dwarfs everything else on the page. Stocks barely moved by comparison.
The House passed a funding package 217 to 214 at 2:35pm ET Tuesday, with 21 Democrats joining almost every Republican to reopen the government after a three-day lapse. President Trump signed it within hours, telling reporters he was "thrilled to sign the Consolidated Appropriations Act to immediately reopen the federal government." The Department of Homeland Security got only a two-week extension, tied to Democratic demands for ICE body cameras after federal agents fatally shot two people in Minneapolis.
The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 had already bottomed for the day by the time the gavel came down. Both indexes hit their session lows between 1:30pm and 2:30pm ET, roughly an hour ahead of the vote, then climbed through the close as the bill passed and Trump signed it. Neither move was large: the S&P recovered about three quarters of its afternoon loss, not the whole thing.
The low prints in the early afternoon. The recovery starts in the window the House took up its vote.
AMD, Merck, Amgen, PepsiCo, Chubb, Eaton, Pfizer, Marathon Petroleum, and Banco Santander all reported fourth-quarter results Tuesday, a schedule dense enough that the day never had a single earnings story. Seven of the nine moved cleanly in one direction and stayed there. Only Palantir, which reported Monday evening, and AMD, which reported after Tuesday's close, spiked hard on the initial print and then gave back much of the move within hours.
Palantir's stock jumped from 147.81 to a high of 161.20 within the hour after Monday's close, when the company reported fourth-quarter revenue of 1.41 billion dollars against a Wall Street estimate of 1.33 billion, adjusted earnings of 25 cents against 23 cents expected, and guided full-year 2026 revenue to 7.182 to 7.198 billion dollars against a 6.22 billion dollar consensus. Chief executive Alex Karp pointed to 66% year-over-year growth in US government revenue.
The stock kept climbing into Tuesday's open, touching 167.04 by 8am ET. From there it slid through the regular session alongside the rest of the software and chip group, closing at 157.88, up 6.85% on the day but nearly 6% below its own morning high.
AMD reported fourth-quarter revenue of 10.27 billion dollars, up 34% year over year, against a Wall Street estimate near 9.67 billion, with adjusted earnings of 1.53 dollars against 1.32 expected. Data center revenue reached a record 5.4 billion dollars, up 39% year over year. Full-year 2025 revenue came to 34.6 billion dollars, also up 34%.
The guidance is what moved the stock. AMD projected first-quarter 2026 revenue near 9.8 billion dollars, technically above the roughly 9.4 billion dollar consensus but short of the above-10-billion-dollar figures some desks had been modeling into the print. In the hour after the close, AMD spiked as high as 249.55, then reversed to a low of 225.02, a swing of nearly 10% inside a single hour, before settling near 229, down about 5% from its regular-session close and roughly 7% from its post-earnings high.
Same shape, one day apart: a post-earnings spike that doesn't survive contact with the next few hours of trading.
Marathon Petroleum gained 6.03% after fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of 4.07 dollars a share beat estimates of 2.73, with a refining margin of 18.65 dollars a barrel, up 44% year over year. PepsiCo rose 4.93% on earnings of 2.26 dollars against 2.24 expected and a revenue beat of 360 million dollars. Merck gained 2.18% even after guiding 2026 revenue to 65.5 to 67 billion dollars, below the Street's 67.6 billion estimate, a guide that included a one-time 9 billion dollar charge tied to its Cidara acquisition.
Chubb reported record fourth-quarter net income of 3.2 billion dollars, up 24.7%, with a property and casualty combined ratio of 81.2%, the lowest on record, and earned a 0.68% gain for it. Eaton posted record adjusted earnings of 3.33 dollars a share, in line with guidance, dipped intraday, then closed up 0.86%.
Amgen beat on both revenue and earnings by wide margins and still fell 1.77%, with the call flagging faster biosimilar erosion for Prolia in 2026. Pfizer beat estimates and fell 3.34% on renewed skepticism about its obesity-drug data.
None of the five round-tripped the way Palantir and AMD did. They simply went up or down and held it.
Two bars carry a story with a reversal attached. The rest are just bars.
Gold futures closed at 4,903.70, up 6.08% and the single largest move on the page. The rebound began well before the New York session: futures traded near 4,680 at Monday's close, climbed past 4,900 by 6am UTC during the Asian and London hours, and spent the rest of Tuesday chopping between 4,900 and 5,018 without a fresh, timed catalyst in the day's wires.
The move follows two brutal sessions. Gold and silver crashed on January 30, their worst single-day drop since 1980, after Trump's nomination of Kevin Warsh, a policy hawk, to succeed Jerome Powell as Federal Reserve chair repriced rate expectations and lifted the dollar. Gold fell again into Monday's close.
Tuesday's bounce coincided with a 0.17% dip in the dollar index, consistent with a mechanical unwind of an oversold, overcrowded short. No single timestamped headline from Tuesday explains the size of it.
The high-yield bond ETF HYG closed down 0.06%. The 7-to-10-year Treasury ETF IEF closed up 0.09%. The 10-year yield finished at 4.274%, essentially where it started.
A government reopening, a chipmaker's guidance miss, and gold's biggest one-day gain in a week all happened on the same trading day. Credit and rates treated it as background noise.
The January employment report is due Friday at 8:30am ET, the first major data point after Tuesday's mixed session. It arrives before the market has finished digesting either AMD's guidance or Palantir's fade, and before the two-week clock on the Department of Homeland Security's funding runs out on February 13.