Final Tally: Kalshi’s Courtroom Coup Wrecks Donnie’s Tariffs… AI’s Existential Crisis: Canceled

Donnie, will you quiet down about your golf handicap… court is officially in session.

Stocks skyrocketed higher this hump day after everyone’s favorite prediction-betting playground, Kalshi, gave Donnie Politics just a 30% chance of his tariffs making it out of the Supreme Court without handcuffs. That was all the excuse traders needed to YOLO back into stocks after Michael Burry jump-scared the market yesterday with another doomsday prophecy.

By the close, the Dow climbed 0.6%, the S&P 500 gained 0.8%, and the Nasdaq popped 1.2% higher… because the only thing more powerful than an AI chip right now is a Supreme Court ruling that tells Trump, “You can’t do that.”

I’ll spare you the legal thesis, but the drama centers around the International Emergency Economic Powers Act… a 1970s relic that Trump allegedly treated like a “do whatever you want” card in Monopoly. It’s the same law that let him paint tariffs across half the globe, and the reason Caterpillar’s been paying 2020 lumber prices for sheet metal while Ford and GM accountants flinch anytime someone utters the words “import costs.”

Well, this week, the justices finally decided to ask the obvious: “Wait, can a president actually do this?” Both conservative and liberal judges took turns grilling Solicitor General D. John Sauer until the legal logic looked like a block of Swiss cheese left on a dashboard in July. Traders didn’t need a law degree to read the room… just look at Kalshi’s odds, which collapsed from 50/50 to 30% by the afternoon.

Over on Polymarket, things weren’t any better for Team Tariff. Before the hearing, contracts gave Trump’s trade war a fighting chance. But as soon as the questioning turned from “please explain” to “you’re joking, right?”, those odds went off a cliff. By day’s end, both platforms had the tariffs’ survival odds hovering around 30%... prediction-market code for “someone start the eulogy.”

In other words, bettors now see a 70% chance the Supreme Court either axes the tariffs entirely or trims them enough for Apple to ship iPhones without needing a military escort.

Meanwhile, the AI trade decided it was done crying in the corner. After Tuesday’s doom spiral (complete with Alex Karp’s unhinged philosopher routine), AMD opened red but staged a Tom Brady 28-3 Super Bowl-level comeback by lunch, closing up 3% after beating earnings expectations. That one stock single-handedly cleared the storm clouds hanging over the entire chip sector and replaced them with dollar signs and delusion.

Broadcom rose 2%, Micron went nuts (9%), and even Nvidia (+3%) and Oracle (+2%) clawed their way out of Tuesday’s dumpster fire… a place currently littered with think pieces titled “AI Bubble Bigger Than Tulips/Tech/Bitcoin/Choose Your Own Disaster.” But again, the chips did their best Stephen A. impression and said “Let me tell you something right now… we do NOT care.”

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 Ford and Apple as mentioned in the article.