S&P 500 and Nasdaq Hit Record Highs Again as Wall Street Braces for Fed Minutes

NEW YORK — Wall Street woke up Wednesday with the rare problem of having nowhere to go but down. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq each closed at record highs Tuesday — the second consecutive day of records — as big tech stocks surged again, per Investopedia. Stock futures were pointing to a lower open this morning, with futures tied to the tech-heavy Nasdaq and the Dow Jones Industrial Average down about 0.7% and S&P 500 futures off 0.4%. The question hanging over the tape: whether today’s Federal Reserve meeting minutes give the rally a reason to continue — or a reason to stop.

It’s an odd market mood — euphoric and anxious at the same time. The record highs say the AI trade still has believers. The fading futures say traders want to take something off the table before the Fed talks. And underneath both, the bond market is flashing a warning that equities keep choosing to ignore.

Fed minutes todayThe afternoon’s main event

The minutes of last month’s Federal Reserve policy meeting are set to be released this afternoon, and they could give investors their clearest read yet on the rate outlook. The Fed raised its benchmark rate at last month’s meeting — the first increase in three years — and officials have indicated in the weeks since that they might not be done hiking, with inflation remaining well above the Fed’s 2% target.

The counterweight: a weaker-than-anticipated September jobs report last week tempered investor concerns that the Fed will raise rates again at its policy meeting later this month — the cool report killed the immediate rate-hike threat — but market participants are still pricing in an expectation that the central bank will hike again before the end of the year. Today’s minutes get to break the tie. Every sentence about inflation persistence will be parsed like a earnings call, because that’s effectively what it is.

The $40 billion AI betSpaceX goes shopping at Nvidia

The week’s wildest financing story got wilder. SpaceX is in talks to raise $40 billion in new financing to fund purchases of more Nvidia chips, according to Bloomberg and the Financial Times, via Investopedia. The package could consist of $10 billion in loans from banks and $30 billion in investment-grade debt, and is reportedly expected to close sometime next year — the latest example of big tech companies raising hundreds of billions of dollars collectively to fund their AI data center buildout.

The scale is the story. Forty billion dollars for one company’s chip purchases would have been unthinkable as a capital plan three years ago; now it’s one headline in a week full of them. But the market reaction tells you the trade’s nerves: SpaceX shares were down 2% ahead of the opening bell, halting their recent rally, while Nvidia shares slipped less than 1%. Investors keep asking the same question about every AI megaround — whether the companies can generate enough revenue to earn a return on these investments — and every new announcement makes the question louder, not quieter. Read more on the AI chip money moves.

Earnings watchConstellation Brands sinks on a beat

The morning’s earnings lesson: a beat isn’t always a beat. Shares of Constellation Brands were sinking after the beer and spirits maker posted its latest results. The maker of Modelo and Corona said it generated $2.63 billion in sales in its fiscal second quarter, up 6% year-over-year and just ahead of analysts’ expectations, and posted adjusted earnings of $3.74 per share — also beating estimates.

So why the selloff? The concern, per Investopedia, was the decline in Constellation’s beer depletions — the metric that tracks shipments to retailers and reads as an indicator of demand. Beer sales, including Corona and Modelo, rose 5%, while wine and spirits sales climbed 17%, but the depletion number told investors the momentum might be softening. The company also announced the acquisition of SpikedAde, a canned vodka beverage, for $75 million with the potential for $278 million in additional payments tied to sales. Shares were down 5% in premarket trading, putting them on track to hit their lowest point since early 2020. When a stock falls 5% on a double beat, the market is telling you it didn’t like the one number that matters.

Rates, oil, gold, bitcoinThe macro backdrop

The bond market is where this morning’s real drama lives. The 10-year Treasury yield — which influences everything from mortgages to corporate borrowing — sat at 5.34%, up from yesterday’s close of 5.29% and approaching Monday’s peak of 5.35%, its highest level in nearly 25 years. Yields that high are gravity for equity valuations, and the fact that stocks keep making records anyway is either a sign of extraordinary earnings power or extraordinary complacency. The Fed minutes get a vote this afternoon.

Elsewhere: WTI crude oil futures, the U.S. benchmark, were up 0.5% at around $90 per barrel this morning, while gold futures dropped 1% to $4,145 an ounce — the haven trade losing out to the risk trade. Bitcoin was trading at $83,600, well below this week’s high of just under $87,000, after a rally had pushed it near its highest point since January. Several crypto-related stocks were in the red: exchanges Coinbase and Robinhood, miner Mara Holdings, stablecoin issuer Circle, and Strategy — the single largest corporate holder of bitcoin — down 3.5%.

The AI tradePenguin pops, Lambda loads up, Mistral previews

The AI supply chain keeps minting headlines. Penguin Solutions posted fiscal fourth-quarter earnings of $1 a share — a 133% year-over-year rise — on net sales of $567 million, up 68%, as its memory business rode AI demand. AI-computing startup Lambda is raising $4 billion in a final round before a planned 2027 IPO, the Nvidia-backed company targeting the public markets next year. And Mistral launched a public preview of a new AI model on Tuesday, with its trained parameters set for release on October 27, sharpening its pitch against U.S. rivals.

Not everyone’s winning the AI era. Fair Isaac plans to cut about 15% of its workforce as competition intensifies for the company behind the FICO credit score — a reminder that AI’s disruption ledger has two columns. And in the power-behind-the-AI story, Google and Constellation Energy struck a sweeping nuclear-power deal: the largest-ever “uprate” project — squeezing more power out of existing reactors — between a nuclear-power provider and a tech company. Data centers need electrons, and Big Tech is now in the business of manufacturing its own.

DealsUber buys its way into catering

Uber is expanding its Uber Eats empire with a $2.3 billion acquisition of catering platform ezCater, giving Uber Eats access to ezCater’s network of more than 140,000 U.S. restaurants generating over $2.5 billion in annual gross bookings. It’s the kind of bolt-on that reads small next to a $40 billion chip financing and a $110 billion Hollywood merger, but it’s exactly the kind of transaction that compounds: more restaurants, more occasions, more orders.

Other deal flow from Dow Jones’ overnight wires: medical-device maker Becton Dickinson will invest $19 billion in the U.S. in exchange for tariff relief, the latest company pledging domestic manufacturing to secure an exemption from the Trump administration’s tariffs; and SoftBank-backed DayOne Data Centers plans to raise up to $5 billion in a U.S. IPO, listing its American depositary shares on the Nasdaq by year’s end — yet another AI-infrastructure name marching toward the public markets.

Today’s calendar is dominated by one release: the Fed minutes this afternoon. Between back-to-back record closes, a 25-year high in yields, and $40 billion in prospective chip financing, the minutes land in a market that’s priced for optimism but positioned for caution. If the minutes read hawkish, the records get tested. If they read patient, the futures flip green by lunch. Either way, it’ll be a louder Wednesday than the futures suggest.