A path forward isn't really clear for S&P, but what is evident is 'resilience', as our ongoing 'trading range' (basically between 4100-4200 at its tightest) is very much still alive. In fact 'aggressive neutrality' aptly describes the drama I've outlined my gosh... for a couple months or so. Not exciting, but correct.

Pexels

That drama today was sort of like a 'sell-the-news' moderating (superficially) CPI, and then the 'surprise' was Google making a big point about challenging the competition with AI, and the big-tech influencers of S&P spring into action, making the session in that dramatic down-up reversal in the afternoon.

Thursday should (barring news) be similar, up early, dip at lunch, then higher, but 'edginess' is likely to increase as the day goes on.

So aside this whole day (because it was about a 100+ handle round-trip) as a definition of 'aggressive neutrality' since nothing much was truly changed by the time the NYSE closed, it was a short-of-force of the influence of AI. Just a couple days ago I referred to this as sort of a 'new era' focused on AI and just maybe on a that 'intrepid' future combined with inability of monetary policy to be quite the juggernaut the central bankers thing they are, as to what this is.

That's not to say the struggles won't continue for bankers, or even avoidance of more regional bank failures, commercial property defaults, or similar but for the most part temporary, interlopers in the grand-design of future markets.

It's mostly AI headlines from Google's Developer Conference that got primary attention in today's market, and while that doesn't define everything for sure, it does denote the focus of this market when it can set-aside the Fed or 'war'. In fact it's the war (though rarely mentioned anywhere) that proved importance, in several ways, of 'predictive analysis' aspects of certain AI implementations.

In-sum: 

Very volatile up-down-up Wednesday, with shorts run-in presumably as Alphabet (GOOGL) moved to outflank Microsoft (MSFT) in AI, or at least be a pertinent entity. It may have been what 'lit' the S&P to it's rousing final half-hour comeback.

As to extending the revival on Thursday, yes I'd suspect that will be attempted early-on. Otherwise there's not a lot pending so analysts focus on discussing theme parks, AI, the Cloud and Treasuries, and really nothing is resolved yet.

The market remains resilient to shocks, for now.

In the late going some stocks were hit, like Disney (DIS)...due to combining Hulu presumably (later this year). It was presented as a 'plus' but the market saw it as reflective of the competitive strains within the (over-saturated) streaming or digital distribution area.

Even that area talked of implementing AI, and the managing difficulties... that is no joke considering that the nefarious use of AI can (and will) imitate a few aspects of management, and maybe the managers themselves. Well at least we can say 'we live in interesting times' (again), with this new era blossoming.

By the way Wendy's emphasized using Google's 'beta' AI 'ordering in their drive-thru's. While nobody discussed it, I ponder if SoundHound will explore this tomorrow during their Conference Call, since they have such a product as well as a US Patent covering the use of neural speaking for such applications (it's a bit vague to me, but clarification will be interesting as McDonald's has a variation for some time). I passively listened for future uses by BigBear.ai yesterday and in hindsight had better questions than were addressed. Maybe I will do so with SOUN, if the opportunity arises.

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