Markets Today: A Little Up, A Little Down

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The S&P 500 barely moved today. Not up, not down. Just…there. 6,978.03. So it goes. The Nasdaq, trying to be optimistic, nudged up a bit to 23,857.45. The Dow, well, it did its thing. 49,015.60. All these numbers. Meaningless, really.

What Happened

Badger Meter, a company that solves water problems, had a bad day. Shares dropped. Eleven percent. A lot, when you think about it. People stopped buying their water solutions. Or maybe they just found a different way to get water. It doesn’t really matter. Then there was Meta, Microsoft, and Tesla. All reporting. All trying to convince us they’re still relevant.

RBC thinks Intuit is a good buy. After it went down. That’s usually how it works. Buy low, they say. Though “low” is relative, isn’t it? C3.ai went up because of a merger. Mergers. Always a good sign. Until they aren’t.

The Fed and the Future

The Federal Reserve did what everyone expected. Nothing. Interest rates stayed the same. Jerome Powell talked about the economy improving. Unemployment stabilizing. As if that means anything to the fellow with the cardboard sign. Now they’re saying maybe two rate cuts this year. Maybe. It’s all just guessing, really. Like predicting the weather.

The Nasdaq went up a little bit because of all the AI and megacap earnings reports. Meta surprised everyone. Microsoft didn’t. Apple reports tomorrow. Another day, another earnings report. Another chance for disappointment. People are worried about AI spending. And prices. And a possible correction in 2026. It’s always something.

These companies, these earnings, this AI…it’s all a distraction. A way to avoid thinking about the big things. The things that really matter. Like the fact that we’re all just temporary arrangements of atoms. But don’t worry about that. Just buy the dip. So it goes.

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2026-01-29 17:43