Software earnings and Nvidia lift Wall Street; Paris the outlier

• US (closed Thursday): Nasdaq Composite +1.57% to 26,541.35, S&P 500 +0.72% to 7,730.99, Dow +0.20% to 53,569.44.
• Europe (closed): CAC 40 -1.68% to 8,319.87, FTSE 100 -0.79% to 10,792.54, DAX +0.31% to 26,367.24.
• Asia (trading): Nikkei 225 +0.44%, Hang Seng +0.17%, Shanghai Composite +0.15%, KOSPI -1.80%.
• The live read on the US day: S&P 500 futures -0.09%, Nasdaq 100 futures -0.27%.

Thursday's American session was a single-theme tape. Nvidia's results, digested through the session, revived confidence in AI capital spending, and a cluster of enterprise-software earnings turned that into a rout of the bear case: Salesforce closed 22.58% higher after beating on revenue and lifting its full-year guidance, Okta gained 28.63%, CrowdStrike 20.50% and Palo Alto Networks 12.83%. The common thread in the commentary was agentic AI driving demand for identity, security and enterprise software rather than destroying it — the fear that has hung over these names all year. Nvidia itself rose 8.74%.

What the rally did not do is spread. Technology was the only advancing US sector, up 3.16%, and every other one fell; the Dow's 0.20% tells you more about the median stock than the Nasdaq's 1.57% does.

Paris moved on something else entirely. French political and budget uncertainty pushed the banks sharply lower — Société Générale -4.99%, BNP Paribas -4.79%, Crédit Agricole -3.97% — on concern that higher sovereign funding costs and weaker growth feed straight through to bank earnings. That alone accounts for most of the CAC's underperformance against a DAX that rose. In Seoul, foreign and institutional selling overwhelmed the US chip lead, with investors reluctant to position ahead of Jackson Hole.

Risk appetite is comfortable rather than exuberant. The VIX fell 4.6% to 14.51 and the MOVE index sits at 69.86, both consistent with a market that sees no near-term shock. Bonds barely moved: the 10-year Treasury yield rose 0.8 basis points to 4.67%, the 30-year 0.5 basis points. The tell is breadth — across PrimerIQ's US universe 2,691 names rose against 3,062 that fell, an advance-decline ratio of 0.88 on a day the Nasdaq gained 1.57%. Our sector medians show the same split: US technology +1.82% against consumer cyclical -1.36% and consumer defensive -1.20%. Gold is trading 0.56% higher at $4,635 and the dollar index is flat at 99.19, so this is rotation, not hedging.

Japan's data set the overnight tone. Tokyo CPI for August came in at 1.9% year on year, in line with forecasts and down from 2.0%, while the core measure at 1.8% ran slightly hot against the 1.7% expected. July unemployment was 2.4%, better than the 2.5% consensus. Nothing of consequence has printed from the UK this morning.

The day's event is Kevin Warsh's keynote at the Kansas City Fed's Jackson Hole symposium at 15:00 BST (10:00 ET), his first as chair, and the reason positioning has been light across Asia. Before that, Europe brings German unemployment and the euro-area sentiment and business-climate surveys through the morning; the US delivers the Chicago PMI at 14:45 BST and the final University of Michigan consumer sentiment reading at 15:00 BST. Canadian June GDP also lands during the New York morning.

The software prints already out are the reason the tape looks the way it does: Salesforce, Okta and CrowdStrike all beat and raised, and all three closed up more than 20%. Marvell and Workday reported fiscal second-quarter results after Thursday's US close, so the reaction to those is still to be priced. In Europe, SAP's 5.48% gain and Computacenter's 7.86% rise in London showed the read-across arriving before the London close.