Stock Market Live February 17, 2026: S&P 500 (ETF) Fighting to Go Green Again

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With NVDA earnings next week, analysts at Citi just reiterated a buy rating on the tech giant. The firm noted that it’s recommending investors add to NVDA, as the valuation looks attractive and the stock is likely to outperform in the second half of 2026.

Analysts at Baird just initiated an outperform rating on Tempus AI (TEM), noting that the AI company is in an “underpenetrated market.”

And analysts at Bank of America just upgraded lithium giant Albemarle (ALB) to a buy rating. The firm added, “With lithium spot prices doubling since our Oct. downgrade and now sustaining above $20/kg, we believe the ‘headline-driven’ momentum phase has largely played out,” as quoted by CNBC.

Even with tech coming under pressure, markets are green this morning.

The S&P 500 is down 20 points, or by 0.31%. The SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) is down about two points, or by 0.23%. The Dow is up about 0.16%, or by 80 points. The Nasdaq is down 155 points. Bitcoin is down another $818 to $68,035, as gold sinks below $5,000. Silver is also back to $75 an ounce.

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) is down 0.74%, with earnings on February 25 after the closing bell. Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ: AMD) is down 2.24%. Micron (NASDAQ: MU), one of the biggest tech stocks of the year, is down 2.63%, or by $10.84 a share. Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) is down by 1.5%, or by 4.52%.

However, in many cases, broken logic is sending tech down, according to JPMorgan.

On one side of the argument, there’s fear that AI will disrupt the entire software industry. Second, there are concerns that hyperscalers are spending too much on AI capex, and that such big investments won’t pay off moving forward.

But both can’t be true, say the analysts.

“If AI companies are going to disrupt, destroy, and replace all software companies, those AI stocks should be more valuable. Or if AI is overvalued and those big capital expenditures are never going to pay off, software stock investors should be less worried about their companies getting wrecked by AI,” as quoted by Yahoo Finance.

NVIDIA Earnings Will Dictate Market Direction

 NVIDIA earnings will be the most anticipated report.

That’s because its status as an AI leader has made it a key bellwether for all AI stocks. The good news is that big tech companies that operate data centers, or hyper-scalers, are saying they will increase AI capex this year, with a good chunk of that going to AI.

We also have to consider that CEO Jensen Huang has said demand for the company’s new Blackwell platform data center products was “off the charts.”

Also, as noted by analysts at Wedbush, “Looking ahead to the remainder of 2026 and into 2027, the focus is already shifting toward NVIDIA’s next milestone: the Rubin (R100) architecture. Expected to enter mass availability in the second half of 2026, Rubin will mark the definitive transition to HBM4 memory and a 3nm process node, promising a further 3.5x improvement in training performance.”

“We expect to see the “Blackwell Ultra” (B300) serve as a bridge, offering 288GB of HBM3e memory to support the increasingly massive context windows required by video-generative models and autonomous coding agents,” they added.

In short, solid earnings, guidance, and anything positive about Rubin could ignite a big rally in Nvidia and the overall tech sector.