It’s been 2,342 trading days since Nvidia and the Nasdaq 100 diverged like this

The 2024 stock market has, for all intents and purposes, belonged to Nvidia.

The chipmaker powering the AI boom has moved in the same direction as the S&P 500 on more than 70% of trading days this year; for the Nasdaq 100, that share is close to 80%.

That’s what makes the post-earnings divergence between Nvidia and the tech-heavy gauge so interesting, with the stock down over 3% while the Nasdaq 100 is up about 1.2% as of 12:15pm ET.

The landmark event that everyone thought might define the market direction, at least in the near-term, hasn’t.

We’ve gone 2,342 trading days since the Nasdaq 100 was up at least 1% while Nvidia was down at least 2.5%.

Nvidia is a $3 trillion company now; back then, its market capitalization was less than $12 billion. Its weighting in the Nasdaq 100 has increased substantially over this period, making this divergence all the more noteworthy.

What also makes this quite intriguing is that the volatility backdrop has been wildly different recently compared to previous times Nvidia has reported in the past year, as flagged by Macro Risk Advisors CEO and founder Dean Curnutt, ahead of the event.

We can backfill some good reasons why it hasn’t, like the strong performance of software stocks on the heels of Saleforce’s strong earnings, or this comment from Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives on how Nvidia is helping the entire semi industry (via BNN’s Amber Kanwar).

But stepping back, the conditions for a negatively-received Nvidia report to destabilize the broader market seemed to be present. That simply hasn’t happened.