Morning Brief | Thursday, August 27, 2026

Research Desk · August 27, 2026

Where Things Stood At The Close

The S&P 500 finished Wednesday at 7,675.70, down 0.02 percent. Call it unchanged.

The Dow slipped 0.21 percent to 53,463.88. The Nasdaq eased 0.08 percent to 26,130.19.

Nvidia closed down 1.59 percent at $209.66, before it reported. The real session started at 4:20 PM.

Macro Pulse

July PCE landed Wednesday morning. Headline inflation rose 0.2 percent on the month and 3.7 percent on the year, a tenth above forecast.

Core PCE came in exactly as expected: up 0.2 percent on the month, 3.3 percent on the year. That leaves core running 1.3 points above the Fed's target.

Personal income rose 0.4 percent while spending rose only 0.2 percent. Goods prices actually fell 0.1 percent. Services rose 0.3 percent, and that is where the stickiness lives.

Markets put the odds of a September hike at roughly one in three. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh gives his first Jackson Hole keynote on Friday.

Stock Highlight: Nvidia (NVDA)

Revenue came in at $96.22 billion, up 106 percent from a year ago and past the $92.18 billion consensus. Adjusted earnings were $2.22 against $2.10 expected.

Data center revenue did $89.0 billion, up 117 percent. Networking inside that segment grew 138 percent.

Guidance for this quarter is $108 billion at the midpoint, above the $104.2 billion Wall Street had penciled in, at roughly 74 percent gross margin. That number assumes zero data center compute revenue from China.

The stock rose about 4.7 percent after hours to $219.53.

Here is the line worth reading twice. Nvidia disclosed $366 billion in multiyear commitments, including $279 billion tied to supply and capacity, plus up to $108.5 billion in phased guarantees. Total debt went from $8.5 billion in January to $33.4 billion.

Picture a builder who has already signed for the lumber, the crews and the equipment for next year's homes before every buyer has signed a contract. If the buyers show up, he owns the whole street. If three of them walk, he still owes for the lumber.

Jensen Huang told analysts that supply lets the company commit to roughly 70 percent growth next fiscal year, and that demand runs higher than that. Both the promise and the obligation are now on the balance sheet.

Can You Profit From The Canada Trade War?

The short answer is that the market already tried, and it will show you exactly what it thinks the trade is worth.

The United States put 50 percent tariffs on roughly $20 billion of Canadian goods on August 22 after talks collapsed. Canada answers on September 8 with counter-tariffs on more than 700 items, matched dollar for dollar.

Domestic steel was the first beneficiary. Nucor rose more than 4 percent and Steel Dynamics about 3.5 percent on Monday. Steel imports into the US are already running near 30 percent below last year, which hands domestic mills pricing power they did not have to earn.

Lumber is the cleaner version of the same idea. Canada supplies about a quarter of US lumber and roughly 30 percent of the oriented strand board used here, and Weyerhaeuser mills about 80 percent of its lumber capacity inside the United States.

Aluminum is where the argument gets honest. The US imported 1.68 million tonnes in the first half of 2026 and Canada supplied 1.16 million of it. There is no domestic replacement waiting. The tariff mostly becomes a price, and someone pays it.

Think of the only hardware store left open after the bridge into town closes. Prices go up, and that is real. But the contractors buying from you are the same people whose projects just got more expensive, so they order less.

The other half of the ledger: automakers fell on the news, with Ford and Stellantis off about 3 percent and GM about 1 percent. US tariffs on Canadian cars and parts are set to rise to 50 percent on January 1, 2027. Canada's list targets American steel and agricultural equipment. Oil, potash and critical minerals were left out of the latest round entirely.

And note what happened earlier this month. When a deal looked likely, the steel names sold off hard. Policy gave them the gain, and policy can take it back over a weekend.

Tickers To Watch

NVDA: Up about 4.7 percent after hours. Watch whether the open holds the gain.
CRM: Raised full-year revenue guidance to $46.1 billion to $46.4 billion. Jumped double digits after the close.
CRWD: Up roughly 10 percent late. Net new annual recurring revenue hit a record $333 million, up 51 percent.
OKTA: Up about 19 percent after hours on a beat and raised guidance.
NUE, STLD: The domestic steel trade. Canada's retaliation list starts September 8.
WY: The lumber version of the same trade, with most milling capacity already onshore.
F, GM: Carrying the cost side of the tariff, not the benefit.

Bottom Line

Two stories ran side by side Wednesday, and they point in opposite directions.

AI spending is still accelerating, and Nvidia has now committed hundreds of billions of dollars to keeping it that way. Meanwhile core inflation has not moved in a year and sits at 3.3 percent.

On the tariff question, be clear about what you are buying. A steel or lumber position here is a policy trade, priced off a negotiation that could reopen at any point. That is a different thing from a business you intend to hold for a decade.