Ringside · Pre-Bell · August 11
- Riot Platforms leaps 19% pre-market on a 191-megawatt lease to a frontier AI lab.
- Crude adds 1.9% to $83.68 with July consumer prices due tomorrow at 8:30 ET.
- Super Micro, CoreWeave and Lumentum all report after tonight's close.
Indexes
One of the three big Asian markets never opened. Tokyo was shut for the Mountain Day holiday, which took Japanese equities and cash Treasury trading out of the overnight session entirely, leaving Hong Kong to give back Monday's advance and Seoul to extend its own. Europe is quieter still: London, Frankfurt, Paris and the region-wide Euro Stoxx benchmark all sit within two-tenths of a point of where they finished Monday.
| Future | Level | % Chg | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| ES (S&P 500) | 7,782.50 | -0.06% | |
| NQ (Nasdaq 100) | 29,803.25 | -0.10% | Widest of the four |
| YM (Dow) | 54,033.00 | -0.06% | |
| RTY (Russell 2000) | 3,026.60 | -0.13% | Fifth session under the record |
| Overseas | Level | % Chg | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hang Seng | 25,652.82 | -1.10% | Erases Monday's 269-point gain |
| Kospi | 6,345.53 | +0.73% | Samsung Electronics up over 4% |
| Nikkei 225 | 66,970.22 | Closed | Mountain Day; Monday's finish |
In the News
Rates, FX, Commodities
Long yields did their moving on Monday and then sat still, because the market that would ordinarily trade them overnight was closed. Ten-year notes added six basis points in the American session, per Bloomberg.
| Treasury | Yield | Note |
|---|---|---|
| 2-Year | 4.19% | 7 August constant-maturity reading |
| 5-Year | 4.405% | |
| 10-Year | 4.699% | Six basis points added Monday |
| 30-Year | 5.243% |
Crude has extended Monday's move rather than faded it, which is the part worth noticing: a 5% day followed by another 2% is a market repricing supply, not one chasing a headline. A Bloomberg gauge of the dollar held Monday's gains.
| Commodity | Price | % Chg | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| WTI crude | $83.68 | +1.90% | September contract |
| Brent crude | $89.19 | +1.72% | October contract |
| Gold | $4,436.50 | +0.38% | December contract |
| Natural gas | $2.752 | -0.86% | Gives back part of Monday |
Technicals
The S&P 500 closed Monday at 7,753.11, some 4.53 points below the 7,757.64 it printed on Friday and 215.81 points above its twenty-day average at 7,537.30. Four and a half points is not resistance in any meaningful sense; it is a rounding error that has survived a full session. The Nasdaq Composite at 26,605.36 has real work ahead, sitting 1.80% under its twelve-month closing high of 27,093.90.
Ten-year notes at 4.699% have spent three weeks inside a band bounded roughly by 4.55% and 4.72%, and the upper edge is within reach without an inflation reading having to do anything. Three auctions land between today and Thursday, so supply gets a vote before the data does.
On Holding lost a sixth of its market value before the bell after a revenue miss, and the intraday chart traces where the selling started.
Breakouts & Breakdowns
Breakouts
Cardinal Health (CAH) — indicated at $242.60 before the bell, which would clear the $239.71 twelve-month closing high set earlier this month. It finished Monday at $237.18, already 5% above its fifty-day average.
Sea Limited (SE) — bid at $121.90 against Monday's $114.80 close, above the two-hundred-day average of $109.01 for the first time since spring. The twelve-month high at $196.50 remains a long way off.
Breakdowns
On Holding (ONON) — quoted at $32.50, within 2% of the $31.88 twelve-month low and far beneath a two-hundred-day average at $40.48 it last traded above in June.
Rocket Lab (RKLB) — offered at $75.36 after a $80.04 close, putting the two-hundred-day average of $78.05 underfoot rather than overhead. The fifty-day sits at $89.19.
Top Movers
Gainers
Riot Platforms (RIOT), +19.2% to $23.12. The bitcoin miner reported second-quarter revenue of $174.20 million against the $152.06 million analysts carried, and disclosed a twenty-year lease of 191 megawatts at its Rockdale, Texas campus to what it called a leading frontier artificial-intelligence lab; Bloomberg identified the tenant as Anthropic. Riot puts the initial contract revenue near $9.10 billion through June 2048. The market is paying for the swap of an earnings stream priced off the bitcoin curve for one priced off a two-decade corporate lease, and an adjusted EBITDA loss of $69.73 million barely registered against it. Rival miners are up between 0.6% and 1.6% while bitcoin itself is down 2%, which is how company-specific the market thinks this is.
Sea Limited (SE), +6.2% to $121.90. The Singapore operator of Shopee and Garena posted second-quarter revenue of $7.8 billion against consensus near $7.34 billion, with net income of $458 million, and Shopee set records in merchandise volume, order count and revenue. Its Brazilian business and its automated search tools have been management's two talking points all year; this is the quarter where the revenue line settles the argument.
Plug Power (PLUG), +13.3% to $2.39. Monday punished the hydrogen company for a report that beat on revenue and reached breakeven gross margin; this morning is the second look.
Losers
On Holding (ONON), -16.2% to $32.50. The Swiss running-shoe maker earned CHF 0.31 a share against the CHF 0.29 expected, but revenue of CHF 850.3 million missed the CHF 881.4 million consensus even after growing 13.5%. Management set full-year constant-currency sales growth in the low-20% range and blamed part of the shortfall on deliberately holding back wholesale shipments ahead of new product. It also raised its full-year gross margin target to at least 65.0%, which tells you the shortfall was a volume decision and nothing about whether the demand returns.
Rocket Lab (RKLB), -5.8% to $75.36. Second-quarter revenue was a company record at $234 million, up 62% from a year earlier, and backlog grew 137% to $2.36 billion. The stock is down anyway on a wider adjusted loss and on management's warning that cash use stays elevated through Neutron development, with free cash flow not turning positive until eighteen to twenty-four months after that rocket first flies.
Venture Global (VG), -7.3% to $13.22. The gas exporter raised its 2026 EBITDA outlook to $8.2 billion to $8.5 billion, lifted the midpoint of its cargo range to 500 to 518, and grew revenue 48% to $4.6 billion. The shares are handing back all of Monday's 7.5% energy-driven gain regardless, which says the run-up into the report was the trade.
Macro Calendar
| Release | Time | Consensus | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| NFIB Small Business Optimism | Released | 99.8 | 97.5 expected |
| Existing Home Sales (July) | 10:00 ET | 4.07M | June ran 4.09 million |
| NY Fed Household Debt | 11:00 ET | Second-quarter delinquency detail | |
| Three-year note auction | 13:00 ET | $58B | First of three this week |
| July CPI | Wed 8:30 ET | +0.1% | Core seen +0.2%, 2.5% annual |
Economists polled by Dow Jones look for headline consumer prices to rise 0.1% in July, taking the annual rate to 3.4% from 3.5%. Bond traders have September priced as close to a coin toss between a quarter-point increase and no move at all, per the CME FedWatch tool, so the reading arrives with the committee genuinely undecided rather than fine-tuning.
Earnings Today
The morning belongs to Cardinal Health, which reported fiscal fourth-quarter results before the open with analysts looking for $2.42 a share on $65.11 billion of revenue, and hosts its call at 8:30 ET. The distributor has beaten the consensus in each of its last four quarters, by an average of 10.27%. Sea Limited, On Holding, Venture Global and CAVA also crossed the wire early, three of them covered above.
The evening is heavier and unusually coherent. Super Micro Computer speaks at 5:00 ET having guided fiscal fourth-quarter revenue to between $11.0 billion and $12.5 billion and flagged more than $60 billion of new orders. CoreWeave carries a $99 billion backlog, roughly 112% revenue growth and a quarterly net loss near $740 million, and gives no formal guidance. Lumentum arrives up 94% for the year after a record $808 million revenue quarter, and its order book for 800-gigabit and 1.6-terabit optical parts is the closest thing available to a direct read on data-center buildouts.
Drivers
- The three-year auction at 1:00 ET, which nobody is watching and probably should be. The front end has to absorb $58 billion hours before a reading traders have priced as a coin toss. A soft auction would lift yields into tomorrow morning for reasons that have nothing to do with prices, and the ten-year at 4.699% is close enough to the top of its band that it would not take much.
- Whether tonight's three reports agree with each other. Super Micro assembles the servers, CoreWeave rents them out, and Lumentum makes the optical parts that connect them, so three views of the same buildout land within an hour. Coherent and Lumentum both fell hard Monday with no company news, which is what de-risking looks like when two stocks have run 105% and 94% into a report. Super Micro closed at $31.46, twenty cents beneath its fifty-day average.
- Whether energy can carry the index a second day. Monday's 4.66% gain in the energy group was worth about a fifth of a point to the S&P 500 and the rest of the market took it straight back. Crude is up again, but the sector is roughly 3% of the index while Apple and Nvidia together are more than twice that, so the arithmetic that failed on Monday has not improved overnight. The index needs 4.53 points.