Tuesday was settled by income statements

The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 52,495.88 on Tuesday, up 529.85 points or 1.02%. The S&P 500 rose 0.28% to 7,712.57, and the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.02% to 26,424.82¹. Healthcare led with a gain of 2.34%; only communication services and technology fell¹. The VIX, the options market’s gauge of expected swings, dropped 6.13% to 17.31¹.

Who did the lifting. It was not the AI giants. Among companies worth more than $1 trillion, only Amazon and Tesla rose, by about 1%¹. The work was done by older businesses reporting their quarters: 3M rose 5.8% after sales and profit beat expectations and it raised guidance, Northrop Grumman gained 4.57%, and Hasbro rose more than 11% on a 34% jump in sales of its Magic: The Gathering line^1,2. A toy maker’s card game moved more than a chip index on Tuesday. That is what a rotation into receipts looks like.

After the bell. SpaceX reported its first quarterly profit, $4.4 billion, on revenue up 161% to $14.58 billion^1,2. Its capital spending rose to $19.59 billion from $6.9 billion in the second quarter². Netflix went the other way, falling nearly 5% after hours as it cut its advertising revenue forecast to $2.7 billion from $3 billion².

Asia read the reports, not the worries. On Wednesday morning the Kospi rose 3.62% and the Nikkei 225 1.76%, and Nasdaq 100 futures were up 0.7%³. CNBC TV18 tied the move to the overnight earnings from the biggest beneficiaries of AI spending³.

Last week the AI story was told in fears about financing. This week it is being told in quarterly accounts, line by line. You do not have to like the valuations to prefer the second kind of evidence.