They had us in the first half, not gonna lie…

After three straight days of getting kicked in the family jewels, the market finally got its swagger back. The Dow popped 370 points (+0.7%), S&P rose 0.6%, and the Nasdaq showed some fight with a 0.4% gain… all because August’s inflation data didn’t jump out of the closet with its hair on fire.

Powell’s bedtime story (PCE inflation) came in line with expectations. Core PCE (aka “we’re just gonna pretend food and gas don’t exist”) rose 2.9% year over year. The all-items index also came in at a noice 2.7% annually and 0.3% monthly. Translation: J-Poww doesn’t have an excuse to slam the car into reverse and backtrack on his rate cut promises just yet. The money printer remains plugged in baby! (at least for now, fingers stay crossed).

This was crucial after Thursday’s “oh sh*t” data dump… jobless claims falling and GDP revised up to 3.8%. That combo was too good, which threatened to yeet those promised two rate cuts straight into the ocean. But today’s “good enough” reading brought buyers back into the action.

Now that we can all relax and enjoy life again… let’s look at some of the biggest single movers of the day.

EA Sports is, in fact, in the damn game… Electronic Arts ripped more than 14% after word got out about a $50 billion leveraged buyout backed by Silver Lake and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. Don’t be shocked if their first order of business is forcing EA to crank out LIV Golf 25 where you unlock Phil Mickelson skins by defecting for oil money.

Boeing continued it’s resurgence… flying up 4% after Turkey bulk-bought planes… then the FAA said “sure, grade yourself.” Which feels a lot like letting Enron handle its own audit (when will we ever learn?).

Intel somehow squeaked out a 4% gain by doing its best Bernie Sanders impression (“please sir, may I have some funding?”) while knocking on Apple and TSMC’s doors.

Trump hopped back on his tariff bullsh*t, dropping a 100% tax on imported drugs unless Big Pharma starts building labs in the U.S. So if you see any pharma execs at Lowe’s trying to rent a cement mixer, maybe help them out a little bit.

But the real “WTF, did that just happen?” moment finally dropped… the Titanic meme “it’s been 84 years” payoff. Trump signed off on spinning off TikTok’s U.S. ops at a bargain-bin $14 billion valuation. Wall Street’s calling it daylight robbery, since the app’s been tagged anywhere from $40 to $100 billion. Beijing still needs to sign off, but ByteDance investors probably just screamed into a pillow loud enough to register on the Richter scale.

I think even Kamala Harris and Donald Trump would agree this week was fugly… the final scoreboard showed the S&P down 0.3%, the Nasdaq off 0.7%, and the Dow just sitting there like a hair in a biscuit. The once-invincible AI trade is starting to look like one big ponzi scheme. But since the PCE didn’t blow up, I’ll take it as a win. As long as those two rate cuts show up before year-end, I don’t care if we bleed red every damn day (I’m obviously joking). 

Speaking of scoreboards… our Stock Prophets Watchlist has been racking up double-digit base hits all week (except for our BOXL trade that went up 180% on Monday), but yesterday we finally landed the home run. NUIA exploded 125% since our alert went out that afternoon. Hopefully you were able to snag a piece of it, because that’s the kind of swing traders dream about. Either way, kick back this weekend and recharge… the bell rings again Monday, and we’re swinging for the fences.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Apple and Intel as mentioned in the article.