Nvidia drives major market index performance today

At some point, the line between “the market went up” and “Nvidia went up” started to blur. On September 2, Nvidia shares climbed nearly 4% during afternoon trading, closing up 2.50% at $190.04, and the broader indexes dutifully followed: the S&P 500 gained 0.47%, the Nasdaq added 0.90%, and the Dow Jones ticked to a new all-time high with a 0.04% advance. The catalyst was a rally across chip stocks, itself sparked by strong quarterly results from Dell Technologies, whose server and AI infrastructure numbers signaled that corporate demand for AI hardware is nowhere close to cooling off. One stock, outsized consequences Nvidia now carries roughly an 8% weighting in the S&P 500. That number sounds abstract until you do the math: on many trading days, Nvidia’s price movement alone accounts for more than half of the index’s total swing in either direction. This concentration dynamic intensified dramatically after Nvidia’s fiscal Q2 earnings report on August 27. The results were strong enough that shares jumped 8.7% in a single session, adding $442 billion in market value overnight. That was the second-largest single-day market cap gain ever recorded for any company anywhere. At ...