Stock Market Week Ahead (August 10-14): July CPI Decides the September Hike, CoreWeave and Super Micro Report, Plus Cisco and Applied Materials

TL;DR

• Wednesday at 8:30am ET is the whole week. July CPI lands, and after Friday's payrolls miss it is the number that decides whether the Fed hikes in September. Odds of a hike fell below even money on Friday alone, to roughly 44% from the mid-50s, and a hold became the base case at about 55.9%.
• The week starts from a record. The S&P 500 closed Friday at 7,757.64, up 0.62%, capping a week in which it gained about 3.5% and the Nasdaq gained roughly 5%, because a bad jobs report is now good news for rates.
• Tuesday is the AI infrastructure audit: CoreWeave and Super Micro both report after the close, with Sea Limited before the open carrying a 19% implied move, one of the largest of the season.
• Cisco closes the loop on networking Wednesday, and Applied Materials reports Thursday into a memory cycle that has whipsawed the stock 40% in both directions this summer.
• Thursday adds July PPI at 8:30am ahead of Applied Materials that evening, and Friday brings July retail sales at 8:30am, the first read on the consumer since payrolls went negative.

What to Expect From the Stock Market This Week

Last week was the busiest earnings week of the quarter and it delivered a genuine surprise: the feared SpaceX unlock produced a rally rather than a crash, and the market ended at a record despite the economy shedding jobs.

This week the argument narrows to one question, and it is a macro question rather than an earnings one. Does inflation give the Fed permission to stay put? Friday's payrolls print did half the work. Wednesday's CPI does the other half, and everything else on the calendar, including two of the most volatile stocks in the AI complex, trades in its shadow. Use the sector heatmap to see where the rate repricing actually lands rather than guessing from the index level.

The Board

One macro print, four volatile reporters, and a market starting from a record high.

Why Friday's Jobs Report Changed This Week

Start here, because it reset every expectation on the calendar.

July payrolls fell by 23,000, against a consensus that wanted roughly +83,000. The composition is what makes it argumentative: government payrolls dropped 53,000 while private payrolls rose 30,000, so the headline is partly a public-sector story. May and June were revised down by a combined 103,000.

The unemployment rate actually fell to 4.1%, which sounds reassuring and is not, because it fell for the wrong reason: labour force participation dropped to 61.4%, a level not seen in over five years. People left the count rather than found work. Average hourly earnings growth slipped to 3.2% year over year, the slowest since May 2021.

Markets read all of that as one thing: the Fed does not need to hike. Odds of a September hike fell below even money, to roughly 44% from the mid-50s, and the probability of a hold at the current 3.50-3.75% target rose to about 55.9% from 45%. Sources quote the hike leg slightly differently, at 43.9% and at 44.1% against a prior day of 55% or 57%; the hold reading of 55.9% is the one they agree on, so that is the number to lean on. Stocks rallied to a record on it.

That is the setup Wednesday walks into. A soft CPI confirms the pause and the record close gets extended. A hot CPI puts the Fed back in play with a labour market that is already deteriorating, which is the genuinely uncomfortable outcome and the one nothing is priced for.

Monday, August 10: The Only Quiet Day

Barrick reports Q2 at 6:00am ET, with the webcast at 11:00am. Gold has been the quarter's quiet winner, and Newmont's record $2.2 billion free cash flow quarter sets the comparison: strong trailing profits against forward numbers that move with the gold price rather than with anything management does.

Simon Property Group reports after the close, with the street looking for FFO near $3.21 on revenue of about $1.61 billion. A mall REIT reporting two days before CPI is a better consumer read than it sounds, because occupancy and leasing spreads say what retailers expect rather than what they spent last month.

Tuesday, August 11: The AI Infrastructure Doubleheader

Four reporters, and three of them carry double-digit implied moves. This is the day with the most single-stock risk in the week.

Sea Limited reports before the open, with the call at 7:30am ET. Consensus wants $0.86 of adjusted EPS on $7.09 billion of revenue, but only five analysts sit in that average and the spread runs $0.74 to $1.00. Options price a 19.1% move struck against the $114.91 close on August 6, one of the biggest implied swings of the entire season. Sea has missed EPS in a typical quarter (a median surprise of -4.9% over the last four) while the revenue machine keeps beating, so which line the market grades decides the day. The real test is whether management holds the full-year guide of Shopee GMV up about 25%.

CoreWeave reports after the close, call at 5:00pm ET. Consensus is $2.56 billion of revenue, up about 112% from $1.21 billion, inside the guided $2.45-2.6 billion, with an adjusted loss near $1.27 per share. The argument is the ledger: a backlog approaching $100 billion, fattened by Meta's expansion to $35 billion of total commitments, against $31-35 billion of capital expenditure. The stock round-tripped violently in July, from the low $90s to a July 29 low near $60 and back to the mid-$80s.

Super Micro reports fiscal Q4 the same evening. Most of the headline is already public from a July 21 preannouncement claiming more than $60 billion of new orders, which sent the stock up as much as 20%. Tuesday is the cross-examination of the margin story behind it. Revenue near $11 billion would be about +91%, and note the trap: EPS consensus exists in two irreconcilable flavours, $0.59 and $0.92 on different adjustment bases, so ignore any single beat-or-miss headline. Options price about 18% against a $28.40 close on July 31.

Cava reports at about 4:10pm with the call at 5:00pm. Consensus wants revenue near $353 million, up 26-27%, with adjusted EPS of about $0.17. The setup is momentum against valuation: Q1 comps ran +9.7% and the year-ago Q2 comp was just +2.1%, the easiest lap on the calendar. At north of 120x earnings, beats are the baseline and the question is whether a second full-year guidance raise arrives.

Wednesday, August 12: July CPI at 8:30am, Then Cisco

This is the print of the week and possibly the month.

Here is the honest state of the forecast, because it matters more than usual. June CPI came in at 3.5% headline and 2.6% core, both well below expectations, against 4.2% in May. The whole of that drop was energy: the energy index fell 5.7% on the month, its largest one-month decline since April 2020, and headline CPI fell 0.4% month over month while core was flat.

For July, prediction-market pricing has clustered near 3.5-3.6% year over year on the headline. A widely syndicated economist consensus of 2.8% is also circulating. The gap is not settled, and the reason to be sceptical of 2.8% is mechanical rather than arithmetic: a 0.7-point fall in a single month is not unprecedented, because May to June was exactly that, but it took the biggest energy decline in six years to produce it. July is the first month that can carry the post-ceasefire oil spike instead, which points the energy contribution the other way. Treat the market-implied 3.5-3.6% as the reference and the 2.8% as unresolved rather than wrong.

That June was measured before the ceasefire collapsed is a point we made in the June CPI preview, and the 5.7% energy drop confirmed it. The other thing to watch is the split, because core is the number the Fed actually watches: a soft headline with firm core is the outcome that keeps September genuinely live, and it is the one a reader watching only the front-page number will misread.

Cisco reports fiscal Q4 after the close, with the call at 4:30pm ET, covering the period ended July 25. It is the last big networking read of the season and the cleanest test of whether AI data-centre spending is reaching the switching and optics layer or stopping at the accelerator.

Thursday, August 13: July PPI, Then Applied Materials

July PPI lands at 8:30am ET, one day after CPI rather than alongside retail sales. It is the producer-side check on whatever Wednesday says, and on goods it usually leads consumer prices by a quarter or two. If CPI runs hot on energy and PPI does not confirm it, the inflation scare is a pass-through story rather than a broad one.

Applied Materials reports fiscal Q3 after the close, with the call at 4:30pm ET. The guide is the consensus: management guided revenue of $8.95 billion plus or minus $500 million, up about 23%, and adjusted EPS of $3.36 plus or minus $0.20, up about 36% from $2.48, and the street has settled on those numbers. When consensus equals the guide, the quarter is close to pre-agreed and the reaction lives entirely in the outlook.

The backdrop got louder while the stock fell. Samsung says the memory shortage lasts into 2028, TSMC raised 2026 capital expenditure to $60-64 billion, and the tape has been brutal in both directions: a June record, a roughly 40% drawdown into the late-July chip selloff, then a 15% single-day rebound on July 30. The known cost is new US export restrictions that AMAT expects to remove $600-710 million of fiscal 2026 revenue, with China now roughly a quarter of sales against about 40% in 2023.

Friday, August 14: Retail Sales

July retail sales lands at 8:30am ET, which makes Friday a third macro day rather than a wind-down.

This is the first spending read since payrolls turned negative. Put it next to Friday's participation rate of 61.4%, Wednesday's inflation print and Thursday's PPI and you have the entire argument about whether this is a soft landing or the front edge of something worse.

What to Look Out For Beyond the Calendar

The SpaceX day-70 tranche lands around August 21. Roughly 319 million shares, our own derived figure against an approximate date, become eligible. The first unlock produced a 6.1% rally rather than a crash, which cuts both ways for the next one: the fear has been discharged, and the supply is still scheduled. The full staircase runs to December 8, and the lock-up calendar tool tracks the dates.

The following week is the retail week: Home Depot on August 18, then Walmart and Deere on August 20. If Friday's retail sales print is soft, those three become the confirmation or the refutation. Dates for the whole slate are in the earnings calendar.

Jackson Hole runs August 27-29, with this year's topic "Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy". In a year where the debate is whether to hike rather than cut, the symposium matters more than a topic about payments suggests.

The One-Line Read

A week that starts from a record high and a shrinking labour force comes down to one number on Wednesday morning: if July CPI confirms the cooling June showed, the September hike comes off the table and the rally has room, and if the oil spike that June was too early to capture shows up in the headline instead, the market has to price a Fed that may still hike into a jobs market already losing 23,000 a month, which is the one outcome nothing on this calendar is positioned for.