US Markets Overnight: Jensen delivers the goods, and the market shrugs anyway

US Markets Overnight provide some relief for the high Beta crowd

Here is the thing about being the most important company on the planet: you can post numbers that would make any other CEO weep with joy and still get nothing but a red tick in afterhours for your trouble. That was Nvidia’s lot on Wednesday, 20 May 2026, when the chip giant blew the doors off its quarterly result, lifted its dividend twenty-five fold, waved an extra US$80 billion buyback at shareholders and watched its stock dip in extended trade anyway. The regular session was a proper relief rally after three grumpy days of rising bond yields and tech selling, but the real drama, as ever lately, was reserved for after the bell. This is what US markets overnight looked like when expectations had quietly climbed into the stratosphere.

The scoreboard, or: green is back in fashion

After three sessions of being beaten about the head by the bond market, equities finally caught a break. The S&P 500 added 1.1% to close near 7,433, the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.5% to roughly 26,269, and the Dow climbed 1.3% to reclaim the 50,000 handle it keeps losing and finding like a set of car keys. The star was the Russell 2000, up a chunky 2.4% as small caps finally got some oxygen. The catalyst was simple: Treasury yields eased back after the 10-year had spent the week flirting with 4.7%, its highest since early 2025, and that let the riskier corners of the market breathe again.

Over in commodities, WTI crude slid 1.8% to about US$102 a barrel and Brent dropped nearly 2% to around US$109 as the worst fears around the Strait of Hormuz eased a touch. Gold drifted 0.3% lower to roughly US$4,496 an ounce, while Bitcoin nudged up 1.2% to around US$77,200 on friendly regulatory noises. Not a bad day to own things that wobble.

Nvidia again? Yes, Nvidia again

Let’s deal with the elephant, because the elephant is roughly the size of five other elephants. Nvidia closed the regular session at US$223, up 1.3%, as punters positioned ahead of the result. Then the numbers landed and they were genuinely spectacular: revenue of US$81.6 billion, up 85% on the year and comfortably ahead of the roughly US$79 billion Wall Street wanted, with earnings of US$2.39 a share against the US$1.78 expected. Gross margin came in at 75%, up from a mere 60.8% a year ago, which puts to bed the hand-wringing about Blackwell crushing profitability. Management then guided to US$91 billion in revenue for the current quarter, well north of the US$87 billion analysts had pencilled in, and for good measure boosted the quarterly dividend to 25 cents from a token 1 cent and approved another US$80 billion in buybacks.

And the stock fell in afterhours. Of course it did. When the result everyone wanted is the result they get, a clean beat-and-raise simply confirms what the market already believed rather than handing it a fresh reason to pay up, and “priced for perfection” cuts both ways. With the 10-year yield elevated, the discount rate working against richly valued growth names, and Nvidia having climbed for weeks into the print, this was a textbook sell-the-news reaction.

Worth remembering: Nvidia shares have slipped after each of its last few reports despite monster numbers, because the bar is no longer set by analysts, it is set by the whisper crowd, and the whisper crowd is impossible to please. None of this changes the underlying story, which remains absurd in the best way, but a great company and a great trade are not the same thing.

As for the rest of the Magnificent 7, it was a quietly constructive session into the Nvidia event. Tesla was the standout, surging to US$417, up 3.3%. Amazon rose to US$265, up 2.2%, helped by founder Jeff Bezos doing the rounds dismissing AI bubble fears and musing about data centres in space, as one does. Microsoft added 0.9% to US$421, Apple gained 1.1% to US$302 and Meta edged up 0.4% to US$605, while Alphabet was the laggard, closing broadly flat at US$385. The honest framing: a broad tech bounce, not a Mag 7 moonshot, with the seven mixed beneath a generally green surface.

Silicon dreams and a foundry full of feelings

Beyond Nvidia, the broader chip complex was where the real fireworks went off, because nothing gets a semiconductor trader giddy like Nvidia earnings day. The SOX has been on a historic tear in 2026, up well over 60% year-to-date, and Wednesday added fuel. Astera Labs led the charge, jumping around 9.5%, while Intel rocketed roughly 8.2% on positive news around its foundry business, and Marvell tacked on about 7.5%, all riding the AI-connectivity and data-centre wave.

Micron added around 3.6% as the memory shortage story rolled on, and AMD rebounded 2.4% to about US$424 after a rough prior session, with Citi having just lifted its target to US$460. The sector-wide narrative is unchanged: hyperscaler capex remains the tide lifting every boat, even as a growing chorus of veterans mutters about valuations that rhyme uncomfortably with the year 2000. For now, the punters are dancing while the music plays.

One thing worth watching

If you read only one line of this US markets overnight wrap, make it this: the obvious thing to watch is the Nvidia conference call hangover and how Asian and US chip names trade on Thursday, because the afterhours dip tells you sentiment is fragile even when fundamentals are pristine. But the quieter risk is the bond market. The 10-year yield near 4.7% and a 30-year that recently touched levels unseen in nearly two decades are the real boss of this market right now, and if yields resume their march higher, no amount of AI brilliance will stop the multiple compression.

Keep half an eye on the Iran situation too, given oil’s sensitivity to any Strait of Hormuz headline. For more on the AI capex theme driving all this, see our piece on the semiconductor rally at Stocks Down Under, and the full Nvidia result is worth a read straight from the source via CNBC’s live coverage. That is your US markets overnight wrap; go enjoy your coffee.