There was plenty of ceremony in Beijing this week. State dinners, walks through centuries-old gardens, a delegation of American CEOs trailing behind Air Force One. What there wasn’t — at least not in any form that equity markets found useful — was policy.

The verdict from traders was swift. Stocks sold off globally after Trump returned from the summit giving few specifics about what was achieved. Every major index in Asia and Europe was solidly down — South Korea’s KOSPI lost more than 6%, China’s CSI 300 fell 1.12%, and S&P 500 futures were off 1% before the opening bell in New York. That’s not a minor pullback. That’s a market telling you it walked into this expecting something and walked out empty-handed.

The Boeing number said everything. Boeing stock lost nearly 5% after Trump announced China agreed to order 200 planes — less than the 300 aircraft sold on Trump’s 2017 China trip, and well short of the 500 planes White House sources had floated ahead of the visit. That gap between expectation and delivery? That’s the whole summit in a single data point.

Slight tangent, but it matters: the fact that Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Tesla’s Elon Musk flew to Beijing alongside Trump telegraphed serious commercial ambition. Shortly after Trump met Xi, Washington cleared sales of Nvidia’s H200 AI chips to several major Chinese technology firms — including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance and JD.com. A genuine win for tech. But one deal in a sea of unresolved structural issues doesn’t move the macro needle.

Investors were looking for concrete evidence of long-term stability, especially regarding tariffs, technology restrictions, and strategic competition. What they got instead was diplomatic language. Xi and Trump agreed to develop a “constructive China-U.S. relationship of strategic stability” — a framework Beijing said it would treat as its guiding principle for the next three years. Framework. Guiding principle. These are words, not commitments.

No breakthroughs were made on Taiwan or on political prisoners in China, according to Trump’s own comments to reporters aboard Air Force One. And on the Iran question — which loomed large over the entire trip — Trump concluded the summit largely where he began, receiving little help from Xi in dealing with the ongoing war.

Many financial analysts expressed skepticism about the durability of the current diplomatic calm, arguing that relations may have stabilized temporarily but fundamental disagreements remain unresolved. That’s the part worth sitting with. The summit lowered the temperature. It didn’t fix the wiring.

Markets can live with uncertainty. What they struggle with is uncertainty dressed up as progress.