Wall Street's Rollercoaster Ride: Stocks Tread Water Amid Earnings Frenzy

Hold onto your hats, folks! U.S. stocks kicked off Thursday with a shrug, as investors juggled high hopes with a side-eye at those pesky tariffs.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average shot up 140 points, but the S&P 500? Flat as a pancake. Wall Street's playing it cool while diving into a deluge of earnings reports from the big banks and tech titans.

Over at the Nasdaq Composite, it's barely budging, up just 0.12%. And this comes hot on the heels of hitting a new all-time high, thanks to some wild Nvidia news and earnings. Talk about a wild ride!

While inflation data this week got investors all giddy, there's still a cloud of uncertainty hanging around. President Donald Trump's cranking up the heat on the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates, and he's not shy about wanting Fed Chair Jerome Powell out of the picture. Eyes are glued to how this drama unfolds!

But let's not forget the real showstopper: corporate earnings.

Big Tech earnings

Economic data, tariffs, and Trump's interest rate shenanigans? Investors are like, "Been there, done that." Now, they're all about those earnings, hoping for some serious upward momentum.

Stocks went nuts over some killer results from the big banks. And Nvidia? They sent tech stocks soaring after the U.S. gave them the green light to start selling some chips to China again.

The party didn't stop on Thursday. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's shares popped on record quarterly profits, thanks to a booming demand for AI chips. And guess what? TSMC's the main squeeze for Nvidia's chips.

TSMC's big boss, C.C. Wei, dropped this gem:

"China is a big market, and my customer can continue to supply the chip to the big market,"

But hold up, there's more! Investors are chomping at the bit for Big Tech earnings, with Netflix ready to spill the beans after the bell.

Meanwhile, in the wild world of crypto, Bitcoin's (BTC) inching up after taking a tumble from its all-time high of $123,000. Bullish vibes all around!

And over in oil land, prices are creeping up, even with everyone sweating over OPEC+ flooding the market.