Stock Market Week Ahead (August 24-28): Nvidia, July PCE, and Warsh at Jackson Hole

TL;DR

• July PCE and Nvidia's fiscal Q2 land on the same Wednesday. The BEA publishes Personal Income and Outlays for July and the second estimate of Q2 GDP together at 8:30am ET on August 26; Nvidia reports after that afternoon's close, with the call at 5:00pm ET.
• Warsh speaks Friday. The Jackson Hole symposium runs August 27-29, and the chair's keynote lands Friday morning, August 28. It is his first, and it comes 19 days before the September 16 decision.
• The bond market set last week's terms and has not let go. The 30-year closed Friday near 5.27% and the 10-year near 4.7%, giving back the relief that followed Treasury's expanded buyback plan.
• Stocks fell anyway and finished with a Friday bounce. The S&P 500 closed Friday's regular session at 7,674.37, up 0.43% but down 1.4% on the week. The Nasdaq fell 2.1% across the five sessions, the Dow 0.8%, the Russell 2000 1.6% off its record.
• Nvidia walks in at $214.72, its Friday close and 4.6% below Monday's $225.01. The August 28 chain prices roughly a 6% reaction.
• Monday's calendar is empty of US data and carries a policy event instead: Treasury Secretary Bessent holds a press conference on Iran sanctions, with WTI at $87.06 and Brent near $94.

What to Expect From the Stock Market This Week

Two things run at once. The equity market spends Wednesday on Nvidia. The rates market spends it on a PCE print, and the rest of the week on whether a new Fed chair sounds like a man preparing to raise rates in September.

Last week showed which of the two currently has the whip hand. The S&P fell 1.4% in a week when very little happened to corporate earnings and a great deal happened to the long end of the curve. The sector heatmap is the quickest way to see whether that holds once the chip complex has something concrete to trade.

The Board

One inflation print, one earnings report, and one speech, in that order.

Monday, August 24: No Data, One Press Conference

Nothing on the US statistical calendar. The scheduled event is political: Bessent said he would hold a press conference on Monday to set out what the administration means by economic isolation of Iran, after describing planned measures as the toughest sanctions in history, per Al-Monitor and Arab News.

Crude is the transmission line. WTI closed Friday at $87.06 and Brent near $94, above the levels I was looking at ten days ago. Energy can push a services-heavy inflation print the wrong way inside a single month, which is what makes a sanctions briefing a macro event two days before PCE.

Before the US open, PDD reports with its call at 7:30am ET and XPeng follows at 8:00am. PDD has grown revenue and shrunk profit in every quarter since Q1 2025.

Tuesday, August 25: Confidence at 10:00am, Intuit After the Bell

The Conference Board's August consumer confidence index and July new home sales both publish at 10:00am ET. Confidence is the one worth watching. The University of Michigan's preliminary August reading collapsed to 51.0 from 55.2 with inflation expectations rising, and if the Conference Board's measure holds up, one of the two surveys is wrong about the American consumer.

Intuit reports fiscal Q4 after the close, call at 4:30pm ET. Consensus sits at $3.59 on about $4.27 billion, and the options price a 9.1% move against a $367 spot.

Two dated events sit underneath the index names. Advasa Holdings takes its rescheduled Nasdaq debut after pushing from August 18, a direct listing where two customers account for 99.8% of a $10 million revenue base. And August 25 is the FDA's target action date for Zymeworks' partnered zanidatamab in first-line gastroesophageal cancer, a $250 million milestone question rather than a launch question.

Wednesday, August 26: 8:30am, Then 4:20pm

July PCE at 8:30am ET, the Fed's preferred inflation gauge, arriving with the second estimate of Q2 GDP. The July FOMC held at 3.50-3.75% with three officials dissenting in favour of a hike, the most one-directional dissent in about a decade, so the core reading feeds straight into what Warsh can plausibly say two mornings later.

Nvidia reports after the close, results near 4:20pm ET and the call at 5:00pm. Management guided to $91 billion plus or minus 2% at a 75% non-GAAP gross margin, and that guide assumes zero data-centre compute revenue from China. Published consensus runs from roughly $91.8 billion to $93.5 billion, so part of the Street has already bought the beat. The scenario work is in the preview, and the full sequencing of that Wednesday is on the hour-by-hour board.

Salesforce, CrowdStrike and Synopsys have all booked the same 5:00pm ET call slot, and Okta, HP and Nutanix report the same afternoon, with Kohl's and Abercrombie before the open. Nobody will be looking at them.

Thursday, August 27: Wyoming Opens, and the Consumer Reports

Jackson Hole begins Thursday afternoon with registration and dinner at Jackson Lake Lodge. The Kansas City Fed's programme this year is on financial innovation and payments, and the papers will move nothing.

The earnings are the day's real content. Marvell reports after the close on a $0.93 consensus and a chain pricing about 10.8%, the second AI-infrastructure read in two days. Before the open, Dollar General, Dollar Tree, Best Buy and Ulta cover a wide cross-section of the same shopper the retailers described last week as split by ticket size. Dates and times for every name are on the earnings calendar.

Friday, August 28: The Speech

Warsh's keynote is expected Friday morning, ET. The Kansas City Fed usually publishes the agenda the evening before the symposium opens, so the exact minute is not fixed, and I would not build a plan around a time nobody has confirmed.

The asymmetry is what to price. Markets currently give a September hike roughly one chance in three. A chair who has already stripped forward guidance out of the statement is under no obligation to correct that, and a speech that says very little leaves the September question where the August jobs report and CPI will settle it a fortnight later. The final University of Michigan sentiment reading lands at 10:00am the same morning, probably inside the same half hour as the speech.

The One-Line Read

Wednesday is the week: an inflation print at breakfast and the market's largest earnings report at dinner, on a tape the bond market has been driving for a fortnight. Friday's speech decides how long that lasts.