Ringside

Pre-BellTuesday, August 25, 2026

Indexes

Monday's chip selling has been withdrawn rather than answered. The names that supplied nearly all of the damage are the ones bidding this morning: Micron adds 2.28% to $931.19 after losing 5.83% Monday, Advanced Micro Devices 2.43% to $467.86, Marvell Technology 3.09% to $236.37, and the iShares Semiconductor fund (SOXX) 2.07% to $516.64 against a 2.67% fall in the prior session. Nothing about the memory-pricing or artificial-intelligence-financing worries that drove Monday was settled overnight; the group simply stopped selling into Wednesday's Nvidia report. The Nasdaq contract carries the widest gain of the four American futures below.

Overseas the day was orderly. Hong Kong finished 0.02% below where it started, which is as close to a non-event as an index gets, and Shanghai added 0.19%. Frankfurt did the heavy lifting in Europe.

S&P 500 fund (SPY) daily: Monday's $763.47 close, with premarket trade at $766.43.

Nasdaq 100 fund (QQQ) daily: $706.32 on Monday after a 1.00% decline, bid to $712.22 before the open.

In the News

Rates, FX, Commodities

American government bonds have not followed Europe to its highs. That gap is the morning's quiet fact: Bund yields at levels unseen since 2011, Treasury yields sitting almost exactly where they closed.

The crude figure is a screen quote on the October NYMEX contract taken from Barchart rather than an exchange settlement, and it is worth saying that vendor feeds disagreed by more than two dollars this morning as the September contract rolled off. Monday's 2.15% decline is the move that matters; today has added a little to it. Gold sits 17.1% below the record of $5,602.22 set on January 28, a comparison worth keeping in view whenever the metal is described as strong.

Technicals

The S&P 500 finished Monday at 7,652.86, five hundredths of a percent under its 20-day average of 7,656.41, with the 50-day 1.41% lower at 7,546.22. This morning's futures would open the index back above that 20-day line. The Nasdaq 100's 29,023.18 was a third consecutive finish beneath a 50-day average now at 29,316.44; the September contract's 0.81% gain would carry the cash index to about 29,258, some 58 points short of reclaiming that line.

In government bonds the ten-year at 4.702% is 44 basis points higher than a year ago, per Trading Economics, and one basis point from Monday's finish. The thirty-year at 5.231% remains 7.8 basis points under its August 17 peak of 5.309%.

iShares Semiconductor fund (SOXX), hourly: Monday's slide to $506.18 and the overnight bid back toward $517.

Breakouts

Visa (V) closed at $382.41 after a 3.06% advance, leaving it $1.02 beneath its 52-week high of $383.43 and 8.02% above a 50-day average of $354.02. The Energy Select Sector fund (XLE) at $63.11 remains 9.51% above its own 50-day of $57.63 and within 2.46% of a 52-week high at $64.70, though it gives back 0.82% before the open. Energy shares have spent two weeks pricing a supply disruption that the barrel market keeps declining to deliver.

Visa (V) daily: Monday's $382.41 finish is a dollar and change from the 52-week high at $383.43.

Breakdowns

Meta Platforms (META) at $559.02 trades under its 20-day ($574.74), its 50-day ($592.80) and its 200-day ($623.79), and 29.31% below a 52-week high of $790.80. Caterpillar (CAT) closed $811.02 after dropping 2.04%, now 10.27% under a 50-day of $903.82 with the 200-day at $762.42 the next line down.

Meta Platforms (META) daily: the $559.02 close sits below every average that matters and 29% under the 52-week high.

Top Movers

Losers

Dick's Sporting Goods (DKS) -12.45% to $157.00. Second-quarter sales of $5.59 billion rose 53.2% but landed under forecasts, and adjusted earnings of $3.53 a share fell short of the $3.76 analysts wanted and of $4.38 a year ago. The split inside the business explains the reaction: the original Dick's stores produced comparable sales of 4.9%, while Foot Locker, acquired in September 2025, delivered a comparable decline of 3.6%. Management cut the full-year outlook and put the words "challenging athletic footwear and apparel marketplace" in the headline of its own release, and operating margin fell 451 basis points to 7.9%. The stock closed Monday at $179.33 after touching a 52-week low of $175.65 during the session, so this is a second blow rather than a first.

Salesforce (CRM) -0.75% to $207.50. No company news accompanies the drift lower, and the shares remain 3.44% above a 200-day average of $200.59.

Stellantis (STLA) -0.77% to $5.18. A third session of pressure since President Trump said duties on Canadian vehicles, parts, trucks and steel double to 50% on January 1, 2027. Stellantis fell 3.51% Monday, more than any other carmaker, because its North American production leans hardest on plants north of the border.

Gainers

Navitas Semiconductor (NVTS) +6.13% to $12.98. The company agreed to buy Claros, a power-management firm building vertical power delivery and integrated voltage regulator parts for artificial intelligence data centres, in a deal worth up to $232.8 million. Getting current to a rack of accelerators efficiently has become its own engineering problem, and buying the capability is faster than building it. The shares remain 62.0% under a 52-week high of $34.17.

Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI) +4.74% to $112.73. Monday took the stock down 13.77% to $107.63, its lowest finish since July 31, four days after it entered an equity distribution agreement that lets it sell shares into the market. Holders reprice a company that has told them it intends to issue stock, and even after this morning's recovery the shares trade well under a 50-day average of $127.60.

Micron (MU) +2.28% to $931.19. Monday's 5.83% fall to $910.43 was among the heaviest declines in large American semiconductors, and roughly a third of it has come back before the open. The stock has yet to regain its 50-day line at $962.88 and sits 25.8% beneath a 52-week high of $1,255.

Micron (MU) daily: the 5.83% drop to $910.43 on Monday, with the 50-day average overhead at $962.88.

Key Macro Data Today

Consumer confidence is the one with teeth. A reading near the 90.6 forecast leaves the argument where it is; a drop under 88 would be the first hard evidence that expensive energy is reaching household attitudes, and that argument runs straight into the September rate decision.

Earnings Today

Pre-Open

Bank of Montreal and Dick's Sporting Goods have both reported, and both appear above. Nothing else of size arrives before the bell.

Post-Close

Intuit (INTU) at $369.13 closes its fiscal year tonight, with analysts near $3.58 a share on $4.27 billion of revenue, against $2.75 and $3.83 billion a year ago; the options market implies a swing of about 8.9% either way. Zoom Communications (ZM) at $104.19 is expected to deliver $1.48 on $1.27 billion, and Box (BOX) also files tonight. None of the three is the week's event. Nvidia has finished lower in the session following both of its two most recent quarterly releases, down 1.77% on May 21 and 5.46% on February 26, and analysts' estimates were beaten on both occasions.

Drivers

1. Wednesday evening's Nvidia report is what this week is organised around, and today's chip bid is a positioning decision taken in advance of it. Analysts look for about $91.9 billion of revenue against a company guide of $91.0 billion plus or minus 2%, which means the revenue line is very nearly pre-agreed. The live numbers are the October-quarter forecast, where roughly $104 billion has become the informal threshold, and the gross margin, guided near 75% and watched for any sign that custom accelerators built by the cloud providers are starting to cost Nvidia pricing power.
2. Consumer confidence at 10:00 a.m. Eastern arrives with the September rate decision genuinely open. Housing data lands at 9:00 and 10:00 as well, and after last week's move in long yields the market has shown it will trade the second-tier releases when the first-tier ones are still a week away.
3. The athletic footwear group now has a hard number to work with: a 3.6% comparable decline at Foot Locker, which Nike supplies more heavily than any other retailer, in the fourth quarter since Dick's took it over. Dick's opens somewhere near $157.00 against a 52-week low of $175.65 set on Monday.