Nvidia Leads AI Surge — Did the Entire Rally Recover in One Day?
Thursday's AI rally was broad, and software led it, not Nvidia. Nvidia rose 8.74% — breaking a four-quarter streak of falling the day after earnings — while Okta gained 28.63%, Salesforce 22.58%, CrowdStrike 20.50%, ServiceNow 10.04%. The common thread: fresh results and no bill of materials, which makes Nvidia's 71–72% Q4 margin trough on memory costs irrelevant to them. Laggards caught a bid too: Intel +4.36%, Broadcom +4.49%. The risk is that these are earnings-day gaps in names already bid up on M&A talk. Nvidia, the software trio, or the laggards?