Salesforce, software, Nvidia, Micron and the average stock, Thursday session
Measured from the last half hour of premarket trade, so the overnight gap is stripped out and only regular-session buying and selling is left.
Salesforce added another 11% after the opening bell while Micron, up 4.9% before it, closed lower and the average S&P 500 stock fell.
Measured from the last half hour of premarket trade, so the overnight gap is stripped out and only regular-session buying and selling is left.
Salesforce's last trade before Thursday's open was 226.42, already 10.1% above Wednesday's close on a quarter it filed with the SEC at 20:03 UTC Wednesday. From the 13:30 UTC bell it climbed another 11.3%, closing at 252.05 for a 22.58% gain that CNBC counted as the stock's second-best day ever.
The iShares software ETF traced the same path at lower amplitude: up 2.5% before the open, up 7.74% at the close, its largest one-day gain in at least a year. Atlassian, which reported no results that day, went from 0.3% higher in premarket trade to a 10.18% gain.
Salesforce issued nothing new between the open and the close. Marc Benioff's line on the call that "this is not the SaaSpocalypse" and the Claudeforce partnership with Anthropic were both public by Wednesday evening, which means the larger half of the stock's Thursday gain was bought on news roughly 17 hours old.
Micron traded as high as 4.85% above Wednesday's close before the open. From its last premarket trade it fell 3.2%, touched 906.89 in the early afternoon, and finished at 935.39, down 0.32% on the day. SanDisk gave back 4.1% during regular hours and Western Digital 3.6%.
Over the same stretch Marvell lost 4.6%, hours before its own quarterly results were due, and AMD slipped 1.2%.
Seoul had bought the memory trade without hesitation. SK Hynix closed 2.49% higher and Samsung Electronics 1.72% higher in a session that ended at 06:30 UTC, seven hours before New York started selling the same idea.
Every software name on the list rose during regular hours; every memory and storage name fell. Nvidia and Broadcom are the only chipmakers on the green side.
279 billion dollars. Nvidia's quarterly 10-Q filing, accepted by the SEC at 20:36 UTC Wednesday, lists supply commitments at that level, up from 119 billion a quarter earlier, and says they are "primarily memory and manufacturing facilities." The same document says the company is "currently experiencing certain supply constraints."
For the memory makers, a single customer adding about 160 billion dollars of commitments is as direct a demand signal as exists. It was on the SEC's site for 17 hours before the open, it lifted Micron and SanDisk all through premarket trade, and it was the same information when both stocks turned lower at 13:30 UTC.
Micron came into Thursday up 229% for the year and Marvell up 188%. Salesforce came in down 22.4% and ServiceNow down 17.9%, and the software ETF was down 3.1%; one session later that ETF sat 4.4% higher for 2026.
Ranked by year-to-date return, the regular session ran largely in reverse. Nvidia, up only 12.4% for the year going in and level with the S&P 500, landed on the buying side with the laggards rather than with the suppliers whose shares had tripled.
The top two bars fell during Thursday's regular session; the bottom three rose the most.
Nvidia posted results at 20:20 UTC Wednesday: revenue of 96.2 billion dollars, up 106% from a year earlier, and third-quarter guidance of 108 billion. In after-hours trade the shares went from 210.84 to 206.29 by 20:35 UTC.
The call started at 21:00 UTC, and by 21:10 UTC the stock was at 219.67. On it, finance chief Colette Kress put fiscal 2028 revenue growth at about 70%, against the roughly 45% analysts had modeled, according to CNBC and Bloomberg.
Thursday's regular session added 2.3% on top of the premarket level. Nvidia closed at 227.98, up 8.74%, a gain of 442 billion dollars in market value that Bloomberg ranked second only to Microsoft's surge less than a month earlier.
Roughly 8% of the S&P 500 is Nvidia, so an 8.74% move in the stock contributes about 0.7 point to the index. The S&P 500 rose 0.72%. The equal-weight version of the same 500 stocks fell 0.30%.
Technology was the only one of the 11 S&P sector funds to close higher, up 3.16%. Consumer staples fell 1.38%, health care 1.13% and consumer discretionary 1.09%, while the VIX dropped 4.6% to 14.51 on a session most stocks finished lower.
Amazon, which disclosed alongside Nvidia's results that its cloud unit would add 2 million Nvidia GPUs, reached 2.15% higher in premarket trade and closed down 1.54% at 256.26.
Initial jobless claims came in at 203,000 at 12:30 UTC, under the 208,000 expected. Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid, speaking ahead of the Jackson Hole symposium, called inflation "stubborn" and "sticky" and said the policy rate is not restrictive.
Between 4.65% and 4.68%: that was the 10-year Treasury yield's whole range for the session, and it closed at 4.672%, less than a basis point higher. The Kalshi market on a quarter-point September hike went the other way from both pieces of news, easing from 33% at Wednesday's close to 31%.
In the half hour from 17:35 to 18:05 UTC, West Texas Intermediate crude went from 82.73 to 84.15 and Brent from 87.51 to 89.08. SPY had peaked at 772.36 around 17:05 UTC and slid to 769.33 by 18:50 UTC before recovering some of it into the close.
By settlement WTI was at 83.53, up 1.58%, and Brent at 89.70, up 2.12%, ending a three-session slide. Settlement coverage tied the gain to a Wall Street Journal report that President Trump has no interest in reviving June's memorandum with Iran. The earliest timestamped reposts of that report found appeared after 19:50 UTC, nearly two hours after the barrel moved, so the minute it first reached the market is unconfirmed.
Within five minutes of Marvell's 8-K reaching the SEC at 20:05 UTC, the stock went from 243.99 to 235.78. The release showed record second-quarter revenue of 2.739 billion dollars, up 37%, third-quarter guidance of 3.15 billion plus or minus 5%, and a raised revenue outlook for fiscal 2027 and 2028.
Shares climbed back to 242.00 by 20:45 UTC, when the conference call began, then slid to 235.88 by 20:55 UTC, about 2.3% below the regular-session close. Of the chip names sold during Thursday's session, Marvell is the first to face a full session of its own results.
Fed Chair Kevin Warsh is scheduled to speak at the Kansas City Fed's symposium at 10 a.m. Eastern, with the September hike market at 31% and the 10-year yield at 4.672%. Job openings data follow at 14:00 UTC on September 1, the same day Palo Alto Networks, up 12.83% Thursday ahead of its report, and Dell release quarterly results.