The market seems to be able to focus on only one thing at a time these days, so now the focus shifts away from NVIDIA and its booming AI business, the obsession until Wednesday… and on to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where Jerome Powell spoke this morning, somewhat more hawkishly than the market had hoped but nowhere near as hawkishly as a year ago, and the who’s who of economic pontification are pretending that they’re not trying to predict the future.

I didn’t know how NVIDIA’s earnings report would be received before it came out, and I don’t know whether the Fed is done (or close to done) raising rates, now that most measures of inflation and interest rates have both shown signs of settling in a pretty rational area… but I can at least share my thoughts on NVIDIA, which remains a holding in the Real Money Portfolio (though smaller than it was, since I sold about half of the position earlier this year).

NVIDIA (NVDA) was trading at just about their all-time high going into earnings on Wednesday evening, and the consensus among investors seemed to be that at their lofty valuation they really needed to have dramatic blowout results. They had raised expectations almost impossibly high after increasing their forecast from $7 billion in revenue to $11 billion for this quarter, causing the stock price to more than double… and they needed to also raise the expectations for future quarters, reassuring investors that this AI-driven surge in orders for their data center chips is not a one-time thing that will fade away.

And they did both. Not quite as dramatically as they did last quarter, but pretty close.

Their actual revenue came in at $13.5 billion, which is just over 100% growth from a year ago (analysts were following NVIDIA’s instructions from May and predicting $11.2 billion), so that’s not just their highest-revenue quarter ever, by a mile, but it was also NVIDIA’s highest revenue growth rate since 2010… and like last quarter, the forward guidance was more important than the big “beat”. They guided investors to expect $16 billion next quarter (consensus estimates from analysts had been $12.4 billion, so they bumped it up, again, to exactly what NVIDIA told them, that average analyst forecast is now $16.08 billion).

That revenue forecast for next quarter means NVIDIA is predicting that the third quarter ...