INTERNAL MONOLOGUE OF A TRADER AT 3:47 AM
INTERNAL MONOLOGUE OF A TRADER AT 3:47 AM
Staring at three monitors, fourth cup of coffee gone cold
So here I am again. Thursday night bleeding into Friday morning, watching futures tick up and down like the heartbeat of a machine that never sleeps. NVIDIA reports after the bell today. The whole market's holding its breath like a teenager waiting for prom results.
$45 billion in revenue guidance. That's what the whisper numbers are saying. Forty-five billion dollars—more than most countries' GDP—flowing through a company that makes chips for machines that might replace us all. Revenue is expected to be $45.0 billion, plus or minus 2%, they said in their guidance. Plus or minus 2%. As if a billion here or there is just a rounding error now.
Goldman bumped their price target to $200. Goldman Sachs increased the price target for NVIDIA stock to $200 from its previous target of $185. Remember when $200 felt impossible? Now it feels inevitable. The stock's trading at a 55.73 P/E ratio, which would have made our grandfathers laugh, but the PEG sits at 0.68, whispering sweet promises about growth that justifies everything.
My screens are split between NVDA charts and PCE data prep. Tomorrow morning—well, this morning now—we get the Fed's favorite inflation numbers. Core PCE expected to hold at 2.7%. Economists anticipate a headline PCE uptick to 2.6% year-over-year from June's 2.5%, with core PCE—stripping out food and energy—holding steady at 2.7%. The market's already priced in a September cut with 70% probability.
But something feels off tonight.
A solid economic reading drove stocks to fresh all-time highs, but Wall Street traders refrained from making big moves before inflation data that could bring more clues on the pace of Federal Reserve rate cuts. Fresh all-time highs, and we're all just... waiting. Like we're afraid to move too fast, afraid to break the spell.
The Dow's up 3% this month. S&P gained 2%. Even the Nasdaq managed 1.8% despite the AI hysteria cooling off. These should be celebration numbers, but they feel hollow at 4 AM when you're the only human awake in a sea of algorithms.
NVIDIA's got over 90% market share in AI-specific GPUs. Nvidia hält über 90% Marktanteil bei KI-spezifischen GPUs, was quasi ein Monopol in diesem Segment bedeutet. Monopoly. The word tastes different now than it did twenty years ago. Back then, monopolies got broken up. Now we celebrate them, bid up their stock prices, write love letters to their quarterly guidance.
The coffee's definitely cold now.
Here's what keeps me up: everyone's watching the same numbers, betting on the same outcomes. NVIDIA beats, we rally. PCE comes in soft, we rally harder. The Fed cuts in September, and we rally until something breaks.
But what if something's already broken? What if we're all staring at the same screens, following the same algorithms, making the same bets, while the real economy—the one where people work jobs and buy groceries and worry about rent—drifts further away from these glowing numbers?
The futures just ticked green again. NVDA up 0.8% in Frankfurt. An der New Yorker Börse sind am Mittwoch alle Augen auf die nachbörslich erwarteten Quartalszahlen des Chipriesen NVIDIA gerichtet. All eyes on NVIDIA, they said. All eyes on one company that might define whether we have a good day or a bad day.
Dawn's coming. The opening bell's still hours away, but already I can feel the weight of expectations settling over Manhattan like morning fog. Traders will wake up, check their phones, see NVIDIA's numbers, and decide if today's the day we finally break through to the next level or if gravity remembers how to work.
The machines will trade regardless. They don't need coffee. They don't wonder what it all means.
They just execute.