Hold up… did the stock market just forget to hit the alarm clock?

Because based on today’s action, it looked like every trader bailed at lunchtime, grabbed a #1 from Chick-fil-A (no pickles, extra Polynesian), and never made it back to the trading desk. The S&P 500 barely twitched (-0.1%), the Nasdaq gave us the financial equivalent of elevator music (-0.15%), and the dividend-king-loaded Dow Jones fell (-0.3%).

And no, you didn’t need to bust out your Blue’s Clues magnifying glass to figure out why. Every investor on the planet is standing outside Jerome Powell’s metaphorical delivery room right now, pacing around like an anxious dad in Crocs, waiting to find out if it’s a boy (rate cut), a girl (no cut), or twins (50 bps and moonlaunch). No one’s pressing the buy button until Powell either hands the market a warm bottle… or says, “we’ll revisit feeding time in November.”

Now all eyes are on Jay Powell, standing in front of the green screen like a financial weatherman deciding whether we get sunny rate cuts or a hawkish cold front with 40% chance of recession. Futures are screaming 96% odds for a 25-point cut… which, in market terms, is basically a done deal unless Powell trips on the microphone and yells “psych!” It’s not exactly a banger of a cut, but it’s just enough to keep the S&P from crying in the club and to Trump, that’s all that matters right now.

In other news, Eli Lilly jumped 2% after announcing it’ll spend $5 billion on a new cancer drug facility in Virginia. That brings its U.S. manufacturing spend to $50 billion since 2020. We get it, guys. You’re rich.

Webtoon Entertainment went vertical (+31%) after locking in a deal with Disney to build a digital comics platform. Disney’s even buying a 2% stake just in case it’s not a massive flop.

Hims & Hers Health (a name we haven’t talked about in what feels like years) sh*t the bed (-7%). The FDA sent them a “cease the bulls**t” letter over their website claims about compounded semaglutide (aka Ozempic-lite). Essentially, the feds are saying: stop playing pharma dress-up or we’ll throw you in the slammer.

Trump and Xi are set to talk Friday. TikTok might live to serve another 1,000 dance routines, thanks to Oracle sliding into the deal. And everyone’s pretending a broader trade deal could actually happen (we’ll talk about it when it happens, until then… I don’t buy it).

Yeah, today’s market moved slower than a line at the DMV run by sloths. But that’s what happens when everyone’s holding their breath before Jerome Powell struts on stage like he’s about to thank his mom at the Grammys. Stocks hit record highs yesterday, then everyone decided to take the day off. Nvidia fell 1.6%, Palantir slipped 1.2%, and even Microsoft and Google took a little siesta, down 0.5% and 0.4% respectively.

But hey, when the Fed’s about to drop a new track (aka rate decision), nobody wants to buy the top or get rug-pulled live by Jim Cramer on Mad Money.

That said, we’ve probably got a better shot of Cathie Wood beating the S&P without using a time machine than Jerome Powell giving us a straight answer tomorrow. But hey, at this point, a rate cut is all but 100% a given.

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 Disney, Microsoft, and Google as mentioned in the article.