Chips Jump, Software Slides as Hot Jobs Data Splits Tech
Chips jump 3% while software falls 2% — the hot jobs report has split the tech trade in two
In this edition
The Midday 10 Fri, Sep 4, 2026 ~60 seconds 12:30 ET
The August employment report landed at 162,000 jobs against a consensus near 53,000, with June and July revised up by a combined 55,000 and unemployment steady at 4.1%. The market read it the obvious way: a September rate rise is live again, the two-year yield spiked to 4.425% and the dollar turned higher. What followed was not a sell-off but a split. Everything priced off low rates was sold — gold, bitcoin, the megacap software complex. Everything priced off a working economy was bought — semiconductors, memory, and the industrial names. This is a rotation, not a risk-off.
US midday, intraday quotes (delayed, ~12:15 ET)
- ETF board: chips up three, software down two
- The hardware complex is up six to ten percent
- Nvidia and Caterpillar are the strongest shares in the Dow
- Apple and Microsoft are the weakest
- Gold down 1.2%, bitcoin down 2%
- The number itself: 162,000 against 53,000 expected
- The Magnificent Seven are not leading this
- Two and a half months of going nowhere may be ending
- A working economy is the bull case for cyclicals
- Four earnings windows close at today’s bell
The ten lines
- 1
BOARD ETF board: chips up three, software down two
The whole session is in one row of numbers. The semiconductor ETFs are up hard: SOXX about 3%, SMH and the equal-weight XSD around 2.5%, and the fabless fund SMHX about 2%. The software side is the mirror image: IGV and the cloud ETF CLOU are both down between 1.75% and 2%, and the Magnificent Seven ETF MAGS is off about 1.5%. Yesterday this board looked exactly the other way round, with IGV up 3.4% and the chip funds flat.
- 2
UP The hardware complex is up six to ten percent
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Underneath the index moves, the individual gains are large. SanDisk, KLA, Super Micro Computer, Coherent and Marvell are all higher by roughly 6% to 10% at midday — memory, chip-making equipment, servers, optical connectivity and custom silicon. That is not one company’s news. It is the entire physical layer of the AI build-out being bought at once, on a day when the reason given for buying anything else got worse.
- Sector Rotation Where the money is rotating across the eleven sectors — the board behind the day’s leadership story. Open the rotation board →
- 3
UP Nvidia and Caterpillar are the strongest shares in the Dow
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The two leaders of the thirty-stock average tell you what kind of day this is. Nvidia is trading near an all-time high, a session after agreeing to buy Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Caterpillar — construction and mining equipment, the purest cyclical in the index — is right behind it. A chip designer and a digger, leading together, is the signature of a market repricing growth rather than duration.
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Ten lines on the US midday tape, not advice — an investment diary. Published every trading day at 12:30 ET. See The Morning 10 and the Daily Pulse.