Welcome to Markets Desk, your midday read on what's moving markets and the headlines behind them.
Nvidia is navigating uncharted territory after founder and CEO Jensen Huang resigned Thursday following reports of alleged personal misconduct. Huang built Nvidia from a gaming chip company into the backbone of the artificial intelligence economy, and his departure marks a genuine inflection point — not just for the company, but for every enterprise that built its AI stack around his vision and relationships.
Shifting to earnings, Citi strategists are flagging something worth watching in the current reporting season. Yes, the majority of S and P five hundred companies are still beating analyst estimates, but the magnitude of those beats has shrunk considerably compared to recent quarters. Citi frames this as a normalization, and arguably a healthy one — markets priced for perfection tend to be fragile markets.
Meanwhile, Microsoft is deep into a second day of service disruptions across its three sixty five platform, with Outlook and Teams still experiencing significant degradation. Governments, airlines, and enterprise clients are all feeling the drag, and the outage is rippling into third-party services as well, underscoring just how deeply a single cloud provider's stability is woven into the global operating fabric.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
