“Okay, it’s happening everybody stay calm, everybody stay f***ing calm!”

You would’ve gotten more out of watching old Key & Peele sketches than staring at the markets today, and you can thank our nation’s “finest” theater kid club for that.

The Dow slipped just under flat, the S&P 500 scraped together a 0.1% gain, and the Nasdaq went absolutely berserk for… (checks notes in disgust) the same pathetic 0.1%. Not exactly portfolio-changing stuff. But it tracks… nobody’s making moves when the only question on the table is whether the government shuts down at midnight or if Mike Johnson and Chuck Schumer suddenly become besties. Spoiler: Polymarket degenerates are already pricing in a 93% chance Uncle Sam hits the off switch.

But while the rest of the market hit the snooze button and essentially said “wake me up when Donald and Chuck start hugging…” one stock was wide awake: Pfizer. Shares jumped more than 6% after word leaked that the drugmaker cut a deal with Trump’s crew. 

As for the terms and conditions? Pretty dang good actually. Lower Medicaid drug prices, plus a three-year “get out of tariffs free” card in exchange for cranking up U.S. manufacturing. Pfizer pretty much pulled off the Wall Street version of a BOGO: lower Medicaid costs, zero tariff pain, and (more importantly) political brownie points with Donnie Politics. For a former covid superstar that’s been RFK Jr.’s personal UFC punching bag, this was a rare dub.

Turning our attention back to the broader market, a shutdown isn’t exactly a blue moon situation. Historically, these things last under two weeks and barely ding stocks. But traders have more piss running down their leg than usual this time because Trump’s hinted at mass firings of federal workers if the Dems don’t concede. To make matters worse, Credit rating agencies already gave the U.S. a Yelp review downgrade earlier this year. Now the Labor Department says Friday’s jobs report will be canceled if Uncle Sam goes dark (not ideal, unless it’s horrible). So if you wanted clarity on the economy, you’re about to get static. 

As for the other biggest stories of the day… Paychex slipped 2% after earnings, confirming more small businesses are starting to write employees checks the old fashion way.

Salesforce sank 3% after enterprises basically told Marc Benioff, “bro, we don’t need another dashboard, we need revenue.”

Nvidia, on the other hand, got a shot in the arm from CoreWeave’s $14.2 billion AI deal with Meta… as the rest of Silicon Valley stopped laughing for a moment and realized “you know, maybe Zuck has a serious problem.”

Lastly, September did the unthinkable and actually contributed to the economy… to end the month, the S&P rose 3%, the Nasdaq mooned 5%, and even the Dow, half-asleep in its recliner, managed a 4% quarterly win. 

And for our Stock Prophet Watchlist, after our 355% monster yesterday, with the market on an all out freeze, it was tough sledding. But we stayed patient and BENF ended up exploding for a 64% gain after we alerted it. As always, make sure to check the app bright and early tomorrow morning.

If you read all of this, congrats for having a 10 second attention span (better than me). As always, here’s our heatmap for today.

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