Turnaround Tuesday as Software Bounces, AMD Lands $100B Meta Deal, Bitcoin Bleeds Below $63K, Trump's 10% Tariffs Go Live, and Nvidia Earnings Loom Tomorrow – Market Breakdown #185
S&P +0.8%. Nasdaq +1.1%. IBM and CrowdStrike bouncing. AMD +9%. Novo Nordisk still cratering. Bitcoin worst month since 2022. New tariffs took effect at midnight. Nvidia reports tomorrow.
📊 THE MARKET BREAKDOWN
Satirical daily market intelligence for traders who think in systems, not headlines.
Issue #185 | February 24, 2026
🔥 Headlines & Hysteria (powered by Forked Feed)
Forked Feed says: Let me walk you through the past 72 hours of Anthropic’s accidental reign of terror across corporate America. Friday: Anthropic launches Claude Code Security, an AI tool that scans code for vulnerabilities. CrowdStrike drops 10%. Palo Alto Networks craters. Cloudflare, Zscaler, Okta, all hit. Monday: Anthropic publishes a blog post about Claude Code modernizing COBOL. IBM loses 13.2% in a single session. Its worst day in 25 years. Thirty-one billion in market cap. Gone. Because an AI startup said it could read a programming language from the 1950s. Accenture fell. Cognizant fell. Indian IT stocks fell 3% to 5% across the board. A Substack post from Citrini Research speculated about AI eating entire industries and traders treated it like a formal SEC filing. Then today, Tuesday, Anthropic holds a live event and suddenly pivots to the “we’re a partner, not a replacement” narrative. Claude is an “orchestration layer.” It “integrates with” Salesforce and DocuSign and Thomson Reuters. It doesn’t replace them. Thomson Reuters rallied 12%. Its best day since 2008. Salesforce and DocuSign both bounced 4%. IBM is recovering. So let me get this straight. On Friday, AI was coming for your job. On Monday, AI was coming for your entire industry. On Tuesday, AI just wants to collaborate. And the market bought all three narratives in sequence, without irony, in the span of four trading days. This is fine.
AMD Lands a $100 Billion Meta Deal and All It Had to Do Was Give Away 160 Million Shares
Forked Feed says: AMD announced a multi-year deal with Meta for up to 6 gigawatts of AI computing infrastructure. That’s roughly $100 billion in revenue over the life of the agreement. AMD jumped 9%. Great news. Except for the part where AMD issued Meta a performance-based warrant for 160 million shares at a penny each. A penny. Per share. The warrants vest in tranches as AMD hits shipment milestones, with the highest tranche requiring AMD’s stock to reach $600. It’s currently trading around $214. So Meta gets billions in discount chips AND lottery tickets that pay off if AMD triples. Last week, Meta signed a “long-term partnership” with Nvidia. This week, Meta signed a “long-term partnership” with AMD. Meta’s AI chip strategy is now officially “play everyone against each other and collect equity warrants from the losers.” Brilliant for Meta. For AMD shareholders, congratulations on your dilution.
Novo Nordisk’s Next-Generation Drug Lost to Eli Lilly and the Stock Has Now Lost 60% in 12 Months
Forked Feed says: Novo Nordisk’s CagriSema was supposed to be the drug that fought back against Eli Lilly’s Zepbound. It was the whole thesis. The “CagriSema will close the gap” thesis. The Phase 3 trial results came back: 23% weight loss for CagriSema versus 25.5% for Zepbound. Non-inferiority not achieved. That’s clinical trial language for “your drug is worse.” Stock fell 16% Monday. Another 3% today. Barclays cut their peak sales estimate from $12 billion to $2 billion. Twelve to two. That’s not a revision. That’s a funeral. CEO Mike Doustdar went on the call and said, “To say it’s obsolete is quite belittling a fantastic drug.” Sir, Barclays just cut your revenue forecast by 83%. The market is not belittling your drug. The market is pricing your drug. Novo is now down 60% over the past twelve months. It’s at a four-year low. And Lilly is about to launch a next-generation triple agonist that promotes 28% weight loss. Novo is bringing a knife to a gun fight that already started.
Bitcoin Is Having Its Worst Month Since the Crypto Winter and Nobody Seems Surprised Anymore
Forked Feed says: Bitcoin dipped below $63,000 today. It’s now down 50% from its October all-time high of $126,000. Fifty percent. The entire Trump bump is gone. The “digital gold” narrative is gone. The “institutional adoption” narrative is getting tested by the fact that institutions are the ones selling. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index is at 14 out of 100. Extreme fear. Treasury Secretary Bessent told Congress that Treasury has “no authority to stabilize crypto markets.” Thank you for that, Scott. Very reassuring. Bitcoin futures open interest has collapsed from $95 billion to $40 billion. $360 million in longs got liquidated in the last 24 hours alone. And the $60,000 level is now the last line of defense before analysts start throwing around $52,000 targets. But sure, Polymarket still has prediction contracts for $150,000 Bitcoin. And people are still buying those contracts. With real money. In this market.
Forked Feed says: Here’s the timeline. Friday: Supreme Court rules 6-3 that Trump’s IEEPA tariffs were illegal. Hours later, Trump signs an executive order imposing new 10% global tariffs under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974. Saturday: Trump says he’s raising them to 15%. Monday: Markets tank. Tuesday morning at 12:01 AM: The tariffs go into effect. At 10%. Not 15%. Nobody can explain why. A White House official told Reuters that Trump has “no change of heart” about 15% but offered zero details on timing. So we have tariffs that were ruled illegal being replaced by tariffs at a different rate under a different law at a level that may or may not change at a time that nobody will specify. The EU has paused ratifying its trade deal with the US. Japan is asking for clarification. FedEx is suing the government for a full refund on what it already paid. And tonight, Trump delivers the State of the Union address, where he might announce the 15% hike, or might not, or might announce something else entirely. Section 122 allows tariffs for 150 days. That’s a five-month countdown clock. Tick tock.
Nvidia Reports Tomorrow and the Entire Market Is Holding Its Breath
Forked Feed says: Nvidia reports after the bell Wednesday. Analysts expect $1.53 EPS on $65.7 billion in revenue. Both would be roughly 70% higher than a year ago. For any other company, that would be the story. But Nvidia isn’t any other company. Nvidia is the company that either confirms or destroys the AI trade in a single earnings call. Hyperscalers have committed $650 billion in AI capex for 2026. Meta is spending $135 billion alone. If Jensen Huang gets on that call and says demand is accelerating, every stock that sold off this week on “AI disruption fears” will reverse. If he hedges on guidance, or if margins disappoint, or if the China situation stays frozen, the selloff extends. The stock is up 0.7% today. Everyone is waiting. Nobody is committing. This is the pre-Nvidia holding pattern. We’ve all been here before. It never gets less tense.
🔎 Today’s Focus: The Anthropic Paradox
The biggest story this week isn’t tariffs, isn’t Bitcoin, isn’t even Nvidia. It’s the speed at which AI went from “existential threat to every software company” to “helpful partner in the enterprise stack” in 72 hours.
Friday’s Claude Code Security launch sent cybersecurity stocks into a tailspin. CrowdStrike lost 10%. Monday’s COBOL announcement sent IBM down 13%. The Citrini Research Substack post sent dozens of software names to 52-week lows. LPL Financial called it a “market narrative shift” rather than any actual revenue decline. They were right. None of these companies reported lower earnings. None of them lost customers. The market priced in a future where AI replaces them and then partially un-priced it 48 hours later when Anthropic said, actually, we work with them.
This is the new pattern. AI announcements create violent repricing events. Then the follow-up messaging moderates. Then equities partially recover. Then the next announcement hits and the cycle resets. It’s not a correction. It’s not a rally. It’s a permanent state of narrative volatility where the story changes faster than the fundamentals.
The damage is real, though. Most software names are still down double digits since the early-February AI scare flush began. The recovery hasn’t erased the drawdowns. It’s just established a higher floor for the panic. TD Cowen wrote that AI coding assistants “improve software quality and developer productivity but do not replace security platforms.” That’s probably true. But “probably true” isn’t trading well right now.
The question Nvidia’s earnings call answers tomorrow is whether the AI capex cycle is accelerating fast enough to justify the disruption it’s causing in the companies that use the products being built. If Nvidia says yes, the narrative flips bullish again. If Nvidia even slightly hedges, the February selloff in software names has another leg down.
⚡ The Setup
SPY 687.35 | BTC ~ 66,141 | US10Y ~ 4.044% | DXY ~ 97.784
Turnaround Tuesday. Markets clawed back most of Monday’s losses as the AI disruption panic got walked back in real time. The S&P 500 gained 0.8% to close near 6,892. The Dow added 392 points. The Nasdaq led with a 1.1% gain as software names that got obliterated over the past week staged a dead cat bounce or a real reversal, depending on which analyst you believe.
The setup is chaotic. Equities are bouncing but still within 3% of where they started the year. Bitcoin is in freefall. Gold is holding above $5,100 but gave back ground today. The 10-year yield is sitting at 4.04%, which is relatively well-behaved given the tariff chaos. The dollar at 97.78 reflects the tug of war between safe-haven flows and the fact that the US just implemented a trade policy that even its own allies can’t parse.
Consumer confidence came in at 91.2, beating expectations of 87.4. The expectations sub-index surged nearly 5 points. Americans are apparently less pessimistic about jobs and income, which is either genuinely encouraging or a lagging indicator that hasn’t caught up to the tariff reality yet.
Home Depot beat estimates this morning. Revenue of $38.2 billion with EPS of $2.72. Stock rallied 3%. The professional contractor business is strong. The consumer housing market is not. If you needed a one-sentence summary of the American economy in February 2026, that’s it.
🏛 Market Archetype: Narrative Whiplash
This is a market where the story changes faster than the price. Friday’s story was “AI kills cybersecurity.” Monday’s was “AI kills legacy IT.” Tuesday’s was “AI partners with everyone.” Three narratives, three sessions, each one confidently priced in by a market that forgot what it believed 24 hours earlier.
When narrative velocity exceeds fundamental velocity, price becomes a sentiment thermometer, not a valuation tool. Nothing about CrowdStrike’s revenue changed between Friday and Tuesday. Nothing about IBM’s mainframe business changed between Monday morning and Monday afternoon. What changed was the words on a blog post and a Substack.
This is the regime where stops get hunted in both directions because conviction doesn’t last long enough to build a trend. The playbook is smaller positions, wider stops, and the understanding that whatever you think the story is today, it will be different by Thursday.
💧 Flow Pulse
Software flows reversed hard today. Thomson Reuters surged 12% on the Anthropic partnership framing. Salesforce and DocuSign both bounced about 4%. IBM recovered some of Monday’s 13% loss. The iShares Software ETF remains down roughly 20% year to date despite today’s bounce. Dip buyers are active, but the bids are tentative. Nobody wants to catch the next Anthropic announcement with a full position.
Semiconductor flows are mixed. AMD dominated with a 9% move on the Meta deal, but the AMD story is complicated by the warrant dilution. Meta fell slightly. Nvidia was flat ahead of tomorrow. The market is treating Nvidia earnings as a binary event and refusing to commit either direction until Jensen talks.
Crypto flows are ugly. Bitcoin below $63,000 in early trading before bouncing to the mid-$66K range by close. BTC.D at 58.66% tells you altcoins are getting crushed even harder. ETH below $2,000 and still bleeding. Total crypto market cap sliding toward $2.2 trillion. The leverage flush continues. Futures open interest collapsed. Retail sentiment at “extreme fear.” Institutional buyers are absent.
Safe haven flows continue to favor gold over everything. Gold near $5,190, still holding its recent range despite giving back a percent today. Silver at $89 is stabilizing after the January carnage. The trade is clear: traditional safe havens are working, digital safe havens are not.
Forked Feed says: The flow picture is a mess. Software is bouncing on vibes. Semis are split between AMD’s hype and Nvidia’s silence. Crypto is hemorrhaging. Gold is the only asset class behaving the way it’s supposed to. Everyone is in a holding pattern until Jensen speaks tomorrow. The only conviction trade right now is “wait and see,” and even that feels aggressive.
🔮 Forked Forecast
Bull Case (50%): Markets digest the tariff uncertainty and hold current levels through Nvidia earnings. Software stabilizes at lower valuations. Nvidia delivers an in-line or slightly above quarter, providing enough confidence to maintain the range. Bitcoin holds $60K but doesn’t reclaim $70K. The State of the Union produces noise but no actionable policy surprise.
Bull Case (20%): Nvidia blows out earnings AND provides aggressive guidance. Jensen confirms hyperscaler demand is accelerating. The AI narrative flips from “disruption fear” to “build-out opportunity.” Software names extend the bounce. S&P tests the 7,000 level. Trump doesn’t escalate tariffs to 15% in the SOTU.
Bear Case (30%): Nvidia disappoints on margins or guidance. The tariff situation escalates to 15% tonight. Bitcoin breaks $60K and triggers cascading liquidations toward $52K. The AI disruption narrative returns with the next Anthropic or OpenAI announcement. Software names revisit last week’s lows.
Triggers to Watch:Nvidia Q4 FY2026 earnings (Wednesday after close)
Trump State of the Union (tonight, tariff and AI commentary)
15% tariff escalation timing
Bitcoin $60K support level
EU response to new tariffs
Private credit stress (Blue Owl redemption freeze, Dimon “cockroaches” comments)
📖 Available Now!
Before You Blow Up is a psychological reset for traders who already know the mechanics, but feel decision quality slipping when markets get loud.
This isn’t about new strategies, indicators, or setups. It’s about recognizing the moment risk starts lying to you, conviction turns artificial, and small mistakes begin stacking into real damage. Most traders don’t fail all at once. They drift, tilt, overtrade, and slowly bleed confidence away. This book exists to interrupt that process early.
Inside, you’ll learn how to spot psychological failure before it shows up in your PnL, reset your risk framework when noise overwhelms signal, and protect focus during drawdowns instead of compounding them. The goal is simple: trade less, think clearer, and stay solvent long enough for your edge to matter.
This plan also includes access to a private space tied directly to the book. I’ll occasionally add updates, clarifications, or extensions when market conditions materially change or when something needs to be said. No schedule. No noise. Only signal.
If you’ve ever felt one bad stretch turning into something bigger, this was written for you.
💬 Final Thought
Today was a relief rally. Whether it becomes something more depends on one man in a leather jacket giving an earnings call tomorrow evening.
The market absorbed an AI panic, a tariff regime change, a Supreme Court ruling, a crypto crash, a pharma collapse, and a software sector crisis in the span of five trading days. And it’s basically flat on the year. The resilience is impressive until you realize it’s being held together by the expectation that Nvidia will say the right words at the right time.
Everything this week is a preamble. Nvidia is the main event. Trade accordingly.
-- Forked Feed
Forked Feed is a satirical financial newsletter and should not be construed as investment advice. We're just here to point out the absurdity. Past performance of our snark does not guarantee future sarcasm.
🔗 Stay Connected
Twitter: @txwestcapital
Twitter: @theforkedfeed
YouTube: TexasWestCapital
Website: TheForkedFeed.com and ForkedFeed.ai (coming soon)