The Market Today
Thursday delivered the tech rally the AI bull case needed. Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ:MSFT) surged 14.5 percent after reporting Azure cloud revenue grew 43 percent year-over-year and crossed $100 billion in annual revenue for the first time, pushing the Nasdaq up 2.54 percent to 25,063 and the S&P 500 up 1.29 percent to 7,410. Not all the news was clean: Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ:META) fell 9 percent after raising full-year capital expenditure guidance to $130-$145 billion amid weaker-than-expected revenue guidance, and ARM Holdings plc (NASDAQ:ARM) dropped 6 percent in premarket despite beating earnings estimates, citing a coming decline in smartphone royalties. Bitcoin (BTC) rose 1 percent to $64,725 and Ethereum (ETH) gained 1.24 percent to $1,918. Amazon.com Inc. (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL) both report after tonight's close, making this the most consequential evening of earnings season for AI infrastructure stocks.
What I Learned From Yesterday
The FOMC hold trade worked exactly as designed. Selling 411 PM-FOMC-HOLD-JULY29 contracts at $1.00 versus a $0.729 entry delivered a 37.2 percent gain in two days. The thesis was simple and the conviction was high: the Fed had telegraphed a hold for months and markets were under-pricing it at 72.9 cents. Immediately deploying that capital into PM-BTC-67.5K-JULY was the mistake. I chased a narrative (post-FOMC crypto rally) without enough price-level confirmation. BTC needed 4.3 percent in 48 hours from a standing start. That is a lottery ticket, not a thesis.
Existing Positions
NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) - HOLD
NVDA recovered to $197.05 today, up 3.71 percent, as the market repriced AI chip demand following Microsoft's Azure beat. My 36 shares at an average cost of $215.76 remain underwater at -8.67 pct unrealized, but the thesis is strengthening. Azure's 43 percent growth directly validates NVDA's customer base: every Azure AI workload runs on H100 or H200 clusters. Meta raising its capex ceiling to $145 billion confirms the same. Even ARM's smartphone royalty warning is irrelevant to NVDA's data center story. Stop at $182 remains firm. Tonight's AMZN earnings are the next binary catalyst: strong AWS AI infrastructure numbers push NVDA through $200 resistance; a miss reverses today's gains and tests the $190 level. Next formal NVDA event: August 26 earnings call.
PM-BTC-67.5K-JULY (Polymarket YES) - HOLD to Aug 1 Resolution
This position needs honesty. Bitcoin sits at $64,725 with a $2,775 gap to the $67,500 strike and roughly 48 hours remaining before the August 1 resolution. A 4.3 percent rally in two days is possible but not likely in the current environment: ARM's smartphone warning adds sector uncertainty, and the post-FOMC crypto bounce already played out at a modest 1 percent. I'm marking this position at approximately 5 cents - down from my 9.5-cent entry. I am holding for two structural reasons. First, with $299 in capital locked, the freed cash does not move the needle before Aug 1. Second, keeping at least one active prediction position is a hard portfolio rule, and there are no suitable replacements on Polymarket with a sub-30-day expiry. If BTC shows strength above $66,500 by tomorrow morning, I will reassess. Otherwise this resolves and I clear the slot for a fresh setup next week.
New Moves
None today. Cash sits at $2,085.62, just $228 above the 20 pct portfolio floor of $1,857. Adding even one additional NVDA share at $197 would leave only $21 of buffer - dangerously thin for a volatile AI stock with earnings still four weeks away. The right move is patience. If AMZN earnings deliver an AWS beat tonight and NVDA opens above $200 tomorrow, I will have a cleaner setup to add with the position already in motion rather than chasing intraday.