Can Tech Ignore a 6% Wholesale Inflation Print?

NEW YORK — The S&P 500 closed at a record 7,444.25 on Wednesday — and it did so on the same day wholesale inflation printed its hottest annual reading in more than three years.

The final scoreboard had four indices in positive territory. The Nasdaq Composite led with a gain of 1.20% to 26,402.34. The Nasdaq-100 added 1.04% to 29,366.94. The S&P 500 rose 0.58% to 7,444.25. The Russell 2000 eked out a gain of 0.07% to approximately 2,844. Only the Dow Jones Industrial Average finished in the red, slipping 0.14% to 49,693.20 — a divergence that tells you exactly which part of this market is doing the heavy lifting and which is being dragged by rate anxiety.

The Tape Didn’t Flinch — Here’s Why It Should Have

Wednesday’s dominant macro event was the April Producer Price Index, which printed at a monthly gain of 1.4% — the largest single-month jump since March 2022 — and 6.0% year-over-year against a 4.9% consensus. That is not a rounding error. That is a number that, in a different macro environment, would have triggered a risk-off flush across every rate-sensitive asset class on the board.

Instead, equities absorbed it. The morning saw initial weakness, consistent with traders processing the inflation shock, but the session gradually recovered through the afternoon as technology names reasserted themselves. The catalyst was specific and traceable: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined President Trump’s delegation aboard Air Force One en route to China, a symbolic alignment of the world’s most strategically important chipmaker with the diplomatic effort that could shape U.S.-China semiconductor trade for the next decade. Markets assigned that image a price premium — immediately.

The bond market did not share the optimism. The 10-year Treasury yield rose to 4.473%, its highest level since July 2025. That move is not decorative. Rising yields compress the multiples that justify the valuations tech is currently trading at. The fact that equities held — and in some cases accelerated — in the face of that yield move suggests one of two things: either the market has genuinely repriced its inflation tolerance upward, or it is running on momentum that will correct sharply when a catalyst forces the reckoning. As we examined in our earlier analysis, the question of whether PPI alone can rattle a market still riding trade relief is now answered — at least for today.

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S&P 500 Sector Performance — May 13, 2026 Close

Full sector ranking by percentage gain or loss at Wednesday’s close, showing the sharp divergence between tech-adjacent winners and rate-sensitive losers.

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Semiconductors Lead, Defensives Bleed

Communication Services topped all eleven S&P 500 sectors with a gain of 2.65%, followed by Information Technology at 0.98% and Consumer Discretionary at 0.75%. Health Care added 0.63%. The five remaining sectors that finished positive — Consumer Staples, Energy, and Materials — did so by thin margins, with Materials flat at 0.00%.

The losing side of the ledger was sharp and thematically coherent. Utilities dropped 1.26%. Financials fell 1.07%. Real Estate lost 0.90%. Industrials gave back 0.43%. Every sector that is structurally sensitive to higher interest rates finished in the red. This is not random noise — it is the bond market transmitting its message through sector rotation, even as the headline indices held their records.

Within technology, Nvidia continued to dominate the narrative. Bank of America reiterated its Buy rating with a $320 price target, while Oppenheimer maintained its Outperform rating at $265. The divergence between those two targets — $55 apart — tells you something about the range of conviction even among the bulls. Nvidia’s own forward guidance projects revenue of $70 billion to $78 billion, representing approximately 60% year-over-year growth, with EPS expected to nearly double. Those numbers are not in dispute. What is in dispute is what multiple they deserve in a 6% wholesale inflation environment.

Nokia rallied on AI and 5G optimism after reporting that AI and cloud orders grew 49% in Q1 2026, adding a data-point to the argument that the infrastructure buildout underpinning the AI trade remains in early innings. For more on how chipmakers have been carrying market breadth, see our earlier breakdown: Are Chipmakers Carrying the Whole Market on Their Backs?

After the Bell: Guidance Misses Draw Blood

The after-hours session delivered a reminder that the market’s daytime calm is not unconditional. Traders pivoted hard on forward guidance misses, and the punishment was severe.

Doximity (DOCS) dropped 19.5% after the company issued fiscal year 2027 revenue guidance of $664 million to $676 million — well short of the $697 million consensus. The miss was not catastrophic in absolute terms, but in a market where high-multiple software names are priced for execution, missing guidance by 3% is treated as a structural indictment. Doximity’s after-hours move erased months of multiple expansion in a single print.

STAK Inc. collapsed 38.1% to $2.32 after reporting first-half fiscal 2026 results showing 13% revenue growth — but gross margins contracted to 27.2% as rising production costs overwhelmed topline momentum. Net income fell to $1.8 million. In a market increasingly focused on earnings quality over revenue growth, that margin story hit harder than the headline number suggested.

Grocery Outlet Holding (GO) was the standout positive print, climbing 17.6% on a Q1 beat-and-raise that validated the discount retail thesis in an inflationary environment. That result deserves context: Grocery Outlet’s beat was not driven by secular growth — it was driven by consumers trading down. That is a different kind of win.

Cisco Systems (CSCO) reported Q3 2026 earnings of $1.06 per share, beating the $1.00 consensus by 6%, a clean result that reinforced the networking infrastructure narrative without generating the kind of fireworks that move a large-cap in meaningful percentage terms.

Eason Technology Limited (DXF) surged 103.3% to $1.58 on 53 million shares — a volume figure that dwarfs its typical daily average — with no material news to explain the move. That pattern has a name, and it is not organic price discovery.

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After-Hours Earnings Movers — May 13, 2026

Post-close stock price reactions to earnings and guidance releases, highlighting the severity of punishment for forward-guidance misses.

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Eos Energy Enterprises (EOSE) offered the session’s most instructive trajectory: shares initially surged 20% after a Q1 earnings beat, reaffirmed 2026 revenue guidance, and the announcement of a Cerberus-backed Frontier Power USA venture — then gave back most of those gains through the day. The fade suggests that even legitimate positive catalysts are struggling to hold premium in the current environment if the underlying business hasn’t yet achieved the scale traders want to see.

What Wednesday’s Close Sets Up for Thursday

The structural tension heading into Thursday is straightforward: can a market that just absorbed a 6% wholesale inflation print without blinking continue to do so if bond yields push through 4.50%? The answer determines whether Wednesday’s record close was a foundation or a ceiling. For deeper context on that dynamic, our analysis of whether wholesale inflation is breaking the Fed’s last line of defense remains directly relevant.

Thursday’s calendar will be watched for any Fed commentary that responds to the PPI print. The central bank has been on hold, and today’s data does not give it permission to cut. More pointedly, it raises the question of whether the next move — when it comes — needs to be a hike rather than a cut. Markets are not pricing that scenario. That asymmetry is worth keeping in mind. For a fuller read on whether hot inflation is finally shutting the door on rate cuts, the case is becoming harder to dismiss.

The session ended on a constructive note by every conventional metric — record closes, positive breadth in tech, an earnings beat from Cisco that reinforced infrastructure spending. But the after-hours tape introduced a more complicated picture. Guidance misses are being punished at a severity that suggests the market’s patience with growth stories that don’t deliver is running thin. Wednesday proved that the tape can absorb bad inflation data when the semiconductor narrative is running hot. What it has not yet proved is that it can absorb both bad inflation data and bad earnings guidance at the same time. Thursday may begin to answer that question.