Here's a classic market puzzle: a company reports absolutely stellar earnings, beats expectations across the board, and the immediate reaction from some traders is... to sell? That's what happened after Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) reported its latest numbers, and CNBC's Jim Cramer thinks those sellers got it all wrong.

On Thursday, Cramer took direct aim at traders who dumped S&P 500 futures in the wake of Nvidia's blowout fourth-quarter earnings. "Take your cue from the S&P futures at your own peril," the "Mad Money" host wrote on X. "You think any of those sellers were actually on Jensen's call? They wouldn't know the difference between Jensen and Jetson." (For the record, Jetson is Nvidia's line of embedded computing boards for low-power machine learning.)

It's a fair point. If you're trading a stock based on its earnings, maybe you should at least listen to what the CEO has to say about them.

The Real Catalyst Isn't in the Cloud, It's in the Code

In an earlier post, Cramer zeroed in on what he called the pivotal moment from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang's earnings call. "Traders can't even be expected to read the Nvidia call," he wrote, with a hint of exasperation.

So what was the big moment everyone missed? According to Cramer, it was Huang's emphasis on AI coding tools—specifically Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Cursor—all running on Nvidia chips. Cramer's argument is that the real explosion in AI is happening here, in the tools that help developers write code, not just in the big cloud infrastructure plays like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft's Azure. He urged investors to read the earnings call transcript closely, even suggesting they use AI tools like Gemini for clarity if needed. It's a bit meta: use AI to understand why AI stocks are going up.

Great Numbers, Muddled Reaction

Let's look at those numbers, because they were undeniably huge. Nvidia delivered a blockbuster fourth quarter after the market closed on Wednesday. The company reported revenue of $68.13 billion, a 73% jump from a year ago and ahead of the Street's consensus estimate of $66.0 billion. Earnings per share came in at $1.62, topping the $1.53 consensus. The star of the show was the data center business, where revenue alone hit $62.3 billion. That's not just a lot of money; it's a quarterly record and a 75% year-over-year increase.

So, with numbers like that, the stock must have soared, right? Well, the story got a little murky overnight. Shares did jump about 3.5% in after-hours trading Wednesday, but then they faded back below the $200 mark. By Thursday morning, the broader market sentiment seemed cautious. S&P 500 futures were sitting at 6,954.50, down 5.25 points or 0.075%. Nvidia shares themselves were up 1.17% at $197.84 in premarket trading, according to market data.

It's a weird disconnect. A company crushes expectations, points to a massive new growth driver in AI-assisted coding, and yet the reaction feels tentative. Cramer's critique is essentially that the market is focusing on the wrong signal—short-term futures moves—and missing the fundamental story happening on the earnings call. Whether the sellers were wrong or just early is the question every investor now has to answer for themselves.