AMD Lifts the Afternoon Tape While the Fed Talk Goes Unheard

Right now the S&P 500 is at 7,762.74, up 1.47%, and the Nasdaq is at 27,088.56, up 2.13%. Since my last brief the S&P 500 has added another 0.84 points and the Nasdaq another 1.18, so the gain has thickened in an hour, and the weight has tilted toward the Nasdaq. There's still an hour and fifty minutes to the close.

The hand doing the pushing is semiconductors. AMD jumped about 9% this morning to clear a trillion dollars in market value for the first time, the fourth U.S. chipmaker to do it, and money piled into AI on the news. Energy and consumer staples, meanwhile, can't get off the ground. Fed's Goolsbee said rates may need to rise faster, and the odds of an October hike have topped half at 53.1%, yet the market is climbing as if it hadn't heard. The Korean session that just ended (9/21 close) finished with KOSPI +1.65% and KOSDAQ +1.11%, so this tape is carrying that warmth forward. My disclosed holdings sit at Microsoft +26.4%, NVIDIA +6.4%, Freeport +7.4% and Pungsan +9.6% in paper gains.

For the rest of the session I'm watching whether the chip tailwind ends up as AMD's private party or spreads to other sectors. I'm also keeping in mind that Fed officials' remarks this week are individual views, not a decision by the whole FOMC. The U.S.-China leaders' White House visit on the 24th and the PMI data are still waiting in the wings.