Pre-Market Briefing on Sept 29: Nvidia Up 1.68% on $150B Buyback as Market Focus Turns to the Openings

All three major indexes fell on Monday, September 28: the S&P 500 closed at 7,683.69 for −0.8%, the Nasdaq at 26,820.38 for −0.9% and the Dow at 51,481.51 for −0.7%. The reason sat in the bond market: the 10-year Treasury yield added about 6 basis points to 5.24%, the highest since 2007. The stock in focus is Nvidia (NVDA), which closed at $228.86 for a 1.68% gain on two things landing the same day: the board authorized another $150B of buybacks, its largest single increase ever by the company's own account, and it shipped an open-source platform for containing AI agents. Dozens of firms have signed on, the per-firm containment results are to be disclosed later, and OpenAI is not on the published list. August job openings and September consumer confidence land at 14:00 UTC today. The data in this article is as of the September 28 US close, and all times are UTC.

 

Unit: %, single-day change on September 28 versus the prior close. All three are negative, so the zero line sits on the right and the three bars share one scale. Each fell by less than 1%, but the order itself is the clue.

 

The clue points to the bond market. The 10-year Treasury yield added about 6 basis points that day to 5.24%, and the 30-year reached 5.56%, the highest since 2004. A yield is the foundation of a discount rate, and the further out a company's cash flows sit, the harder it bites. One company's news can still push a price the other way: MongoDB fell 18.46% on volume about 9.2 times the recent daily average, after its chief executive left for a rival.

 

Unit: %, single-day change on September 28. Six large semiconductor names picked by hand, including NYSE-listed TSMC, grouped by industry field. The set spans positive and negative, so a zero line is drawn and all six share one scale. Nvidia led at +1.68%, with ASML at +1.58% and TSMC at +0.50% also higher; Arm (ARM) fell 8.70% at the other end, leaving the ends 10.38 points apart.

 

The basis needs stating: the industry averaged −0.84% that day, which is the industry-field average and not an average of the six shown. It was negative and the group split three up and three down, so Nvidia moved against its group. It cannot be written as "the only name that rose", because ASML and TSMC also closed higher.

 

Two things landed the same day. On the money side, the board authorized another $150B of buybacks, its largest single increase ever by the company's own account, taking the total authority to about $235B, and market value rose $91.8B in the day to $5.54T. On the business side, it shipped an open-source platform for containing AI agents that isolates an agent stepping out of bounds within milliseconds; the card names Anthropic, Microsoft and Oracle among those signed on.

 

Unit: 0–100, against peers and its own one-year history, as of the September 28 close, 0 at the centre and 100 at the rim, all five axes on one scale. This is a one-year relative position, not the single session. Peer rank scores the full 100, so it was the strongest of the six that day; trend position 89 and valuation heat 74 sit high, relative strength 63 above the middle. Volatility control is the weakest at 31, the only one below 50.

 

 

Subtract the same-day average of a stock's industry from its one-session move, and the difference is its independence. Nvidia rose 1.68% while semiconductors averaged −0.84%, leaving it 2.53 points ahead. The wider the gap, the more the reason sits inside that company; near zero, the whole group was lifted together.

 

Unit: thousands of openings, the roles still unfilled on the last business day of the month, seasonally adjusted, four bars drawn from zero on one shared scale. Every figure shown is for July, because the August reading is released at 14:00 UTC today. April stood at 7,585 thousand and July at 7,271 thousand, an openings rate of 4.4%. The four bars look alike, and that is the point: the headline has flattened out, with August expected at a only slightly softer 7,230 thousand.

 

Job openings count roles posted and not yet filled, so they measure demand itself and move ahead of the unemployment rate. The Fed raised rates to 3.75%–4.00% on September 16 on a 12–0 vote, arguing that inflation is sticky and labour demand still firm; today's release tests that second half. September consumer confidence lands at the same time, the July house price index comes first at 13:00 UTC, and Barr, Goolsbee and Williams all speak in session.

 

Unit: thousands of openings, by industry for July 2026, seasonally adjusted, six bars drawn from zero on one shared scale. The denominator here is each industry rather than the national total above, so the two cannot be read across. Health care and social assistance at 1,438 thousand and professional and business services at 1,138 thousand hold up the total; information, covering software, internet, telecoms and media, holds only 96 thousand, last of the six.

 

Unit: thousands of openings, for the two industries in July 2025 and July 2026 on the same basis, four bars from zero on one shared scale. Information fell from 157 thousand to 96 thousand, down 39%, while manufacturing rose from 428 thousand to 580 thousand. Across the whole economy, total openings rose from 7,089 thousand to 7,271 thousand that year.

 

The card's own reading: what held up US labour demand this year was health care, manufacturing and retail, not technology. AI capital spending is at a record, but it goes into chips, power and data centres rather than headcount, and revenue has come apart from hiring for the first time.

 

What to look for today: open the information line first, because if August keeps walking below 90 thousand then "revenue up, hiring flat" is not one month of noise. Then rates: a soft reading lowers the odds of another December hike, but the 10-year yield is already at 5.24%, and until the long end comes back the discount rate will not.

 

Unit: %, gross margin = (revenue − cost of revenue) divided by revenue, times 100, on a GAAP basis for each company's latest reported quarter, six bars drawn from zero on one shared scale. The fiscal quarters end on different dates, between late May and early August. In order: Micron (MU) 84.6%, Nvidia (NVDA) 75.0%, Broadcom (AVGO) 69.1%, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) 54%, Applied Materials (AMAT) 50.3%, Intel (INTC) 40.4%.

 

Gross margin measures how much of every $100 of revenue is left after the direct cost of those goods, before research, sales and tax. A high margin can come from very different places: Micron at 84.6% against 37.7% a year earlier, Nvidia at 75.0% against 72.4%. The level tells you where a company is now; the slope tells you whether that is a cycle or a moat.

 

Then there is the basis. Broadcom reported 69.1% GAAP and 74.9% non-GAAP for the same quarter, 5.8 points apart, and the 40% Advanced Micro Devices posted a year earlier included a one-time inventory write-down, so it is not a normal operating level. If the basis does not line up, do not compare. Intel at 40.4% against 27.5% a year earlier is up 12.9 points, and against itself that carries more information than a cross-company reading.

 

Unit: %, Micron's year-earlier quarter, its latest reported quarter and its guidance for the current quarter, three bars drawn from zero on one shared scale. The 86% is company guidance rather than reported results, so it is a different kind of number from the other two.

 

Micron sells DRAM, NAND and HBM high-bandwidth memory, commodities priced by supply and demand. Revenue was $41.46B last quarter against $9.30B a year earlier, and AI servers competing for HBM capacity drove prices this year, so most of its 46.9-point gain came from memory. Nvidia's margin comes from being hard to replace instead: revenue of $96.2B last quarter, of which data centre was $89.0B. A commodity margin turns when supply and demand do. Next time a margin looks handsome, open the same line from a year earlier and check both sides use the same basis.

 

 

A: No. The −0.84% is the industry-field average, covering far more companies than the six on the chart, so it is not an average of them.

 

A: Against the group. The industry average was negative and the group split three up and three down. That is not the same as being the only name that rose: ASML gained 1.58% and TSMC 0.50%.

 

A: No. It is an upper limit the board approved, taking the total to about $235B. When and how much to buy is the company's call, and the card gives no execution figure.

 

A: The headline has flattened out. The gap is in the split: information down 39% in a year while manufacturing went from 428 to 580 thousand, the opposite way.

 

A: A higher level does not mean better. Micron was at 37.7% a year earlier and the difference came from memory prices, while Nvidia moved from 72.4% to 75.0%. What a price rise lifts comes back down; what being hard to replace lifts does not.

 

Disclaimer: This article is compiled and written by the MEXC RealStocks team. The data in this article is based on the closing of the US stock market on September 28, 2026. The content is a compilation of public market information, and individual stocks are publicly discussed targets, which do not represent the recommendation or opinion of MEXC and do not constitute any investment advice. More US stock content: @MEXC | @Alpha_MEXC | @MEXC_Research