S&P futures whipsaw $650B in seven minutes after Nvidia spy chatter

The Kobeissi Letter flagged the sequence on X, calling it the strangest record in stock market history. As the outlet tells it, US stock market futures opened at 6:00 PM ET — the first session since Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang acknowledged a "relationship" with a Chinese spy. Within 60 seconds, S&P 500 futures had wiped out an implied $300 billion in market cap.

The selloff didn't last. By 6:07 PM ET, every bit of that loss was gone and S&P 500 futures had turned green, according to the outlet. The rebound tacked an implied $350 billion back onto market cap as traders piled in to buy the dip.

Add it up and the round trip comes to a $650 billion swing in implied market cap — all inside seven minutes. Kobeissi pinned the whiplash directly on a CEO's relationship, a framing that says as much about how fast money moves as it does about the news itself.

Futures hadn't traded since the Huang story landed, so the 6:00 PM ET open was the first live read on how markets would price it. The answer: a sharp knee-jerk drop, then an equally sharp reversal. No word in the report on any response from Nvidia or Huang.

For now, the takeaway is the speed. A single headline about a chipmaker's chief executive moved hundreds of billions in implied value one way, then the other, before most traders had finished their coffee.