Pre-Market Brief | Monday, August 31, 2026
Research Desk · August 31, 2026
Nvidia beat and jumped 8.7 percent. Marvell beat, raised, and fell 10 percent. The chip complex dropped 3.5 percent Friday while the S&P lost a quarter point. Broadcom reports Wednesday into that mood.
Where Futures Sit
Nasdaq 100 futures are flat, down 0.02 percent. S&P 500 futures down 0.22 percent. Dow futures down 0.20 percent.
Friday closed lower across the board. The S&P 500 at 7,711. The Dow at 53,559. The Nasdaq Composite at 26,402.
The Russell 2000 was the tell, down 1.39 percent while the Dow barely moved. August still finished green, with the Nasdaq up roughly 4 percent for the month.
Macro Pulse
No US data today. The week fills up fast: ISM Manufacturing and JOLTS Tuesday, ADP Wednesday, ISM Services Thursday, the August jobs report Friday.
Fed Chair Warsh spoke at Jackson Hole Friday and put prices first. PCE inflation is running 3.7 percent. Odds of a September rate increase jumped to 57 percent from 35 percent the day before.
Two-year Treasury 4.35 percent. Ten-year near 4.72 percent.
Oil is the other input. The US struck Iranian rocket launchers staging mines for the Strait of Hormuz over the weekend, and Brent pushed above $90.
Stock Highlight: Broadcom (AVGO)
Broadcom reports fiscal Q3 Wednesday after the close. It finished Friday at $368.79, a $1.75 trillion company trading near 23 times forward earnings.
In plain terms, Broadcom designs custom AI chips for a small number of very large cloud customers. Backlog ran above $30 billion heading into the quarter.
Think of two builders. One sells the same floor plan a thousand times and keeps a wide margin on every copy. The other wins a single custom contract worth far more in total, but the client dictates the drawings and the margin is thinner.
Broadcom is increasingly the second builder. So is Marvell, which is exactly why Marvell got hit.
The bull case is visibility, because backlog is contracted work rather than a forecast. The bear case is the setup: last quarter Broadcom beat, left guidance unchanged, and still sold off.
Tickers To Watch
NVDA: Closed $217.55 Friday, down 4.57 percent, giving back more than half of Thursday's 8.7 percent post-earnings jump.
AVGO: Reports Wednesday after the close. The biggest scheduled event of the week for the AI trade.
MRVL: Fell 10.28 percent Friday after a record quarter. Margin guidance of 57.5 to 58.5 percent, against 58.9 percent last quarter, did the damage.
AMD: Down 2.33 percent Friday to $465.58. Up sharply on the year and still sold on good news.
SMH: The semiconductor fund fell 3.47 percent Friday. Nvidia is roughly 22 percent of it, so it is not a diversifier.
XLE: Bid again premarket on the Hormuz headlines. The one sector working against this backdrop.
IWM: Small caps fell 1.39 percent Friday. Higher-for-longer hits floating-rate borrowers first.
PYPL: Dropped roughly 12 percent Friday after Advent and Stripe walked from a reported $50 billion bid.
Bottom Line
Three chipmakers reported strong numbers this month. All three were sold.
The bar moved. Beating estimates is no longer enough when the discount rate is rising and a September hike is close to a coin flip.
The risk for a retirement-focused investor is not the AI theme itself. It is owning it three times without meaning to. An S&P index fund, a technology fund, and one favorite chip name are frequently the same bet wearing three labels.
Broadcom reports Wednesday. The useful work is checking that overlap before the print, not after it.
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