The Friday Wrap — August 28, 2026: Jackson Hole, and Nvidia's round trip

The week split in two. Wednesday night the largest company in the index reported a quarter that doubled its earnings year over year, and Thursday was a party. Friday morning the Fed chair told Jackson Hole that inflation is still the central bank's biggest problem, and that the Fed may have "work to do." The short end of the curve repriced. The party gave back a chunk of itself in one session.

From our own SIP bars: SPY closed 769.35, +0.47% on the week; QQQ 716.43, +0.42%; IWM 295.75, −1.40% and a second consecutive red week. Friday alone: SPY −0.23%, QQQ −0.65%, IWM −1.35%. The index that owned Nvidia and Salesforce finished green; the index carrying the most front-end rate sensitivity finished red twice running.

Monetary: the chair said the quiet part

There was no FOMC meeting in August. The standing decision is still July 28–29, when the committee voted 9–3 to hold the target range at 3½–3¾ percent, with three regional Fed presidents dissenting in favor of raising it by a quarter point. The next meeting is September 15–16.

Wednesday's data set the table. July core PCE, the Fed's preferred gauge, was released August 26. It came in at 3.3% year over year, unchanged from June, and 0.2% month over month. In line with forecasts. Headline held at 3.7% and ran slightly hotter than expected. Per CNBC, inflation has now run above the 2% target for more than five years, and the retreat toward it has stalled, not reversed.

Then Friday. In the first Jackson Hole keynote of this chair's tenure, the Fed chair said that while the summer's inflation readings were better than expected, they "do not tell me that underlying trends have meaningfully improved," and that 2% remains a firm and fixed objective. While declining to offer forward guidance or a reaction function. Per CNBC's rates desk, the 2-year Treasury yield jumped more than 6 basis points to 4.298%, the 10-year was little changed at 4.676%, and the 30-year held around 5.19%. Traders raised bets on a hike as soon as September.

Note the shape. The front end moved. The long end did not. Coverage described long-end yields as edging lower on the speech, which would put TLT up on the day. Our bars have TLT −0.30% Friday and +1.01% on the week. Those are not the same claim and we are not averaging them. The weekly direction agrees. Friday's does not.

That repricing toward higher policy rates is the through-line for the rest of this letter. It is the cleanest available explanation for why small caps had the worst week of the three, why the dollar proxy firmed, and why gold fell hard on the same morning.

Earnings: a blowout, a 22% repricing, and a Friday that took some of it back

Nvidia reported fiscal Q2 after the close on Wednesday. $2.22 per share on $96.2 billion of revenue, up 106.0% year over year, ahead of expectations, with guidance that Kiplinger's coverage described as the reason the stock moved rather than the print itself.

We broker-verified the reaction rather than quoting after-hours numbers, because the two get mixed constantly. Nvidia's Thursday session was +8.74%, 209.66 to 227.98 on 299 million shares, roughly double the prior day's volume. Its Friday session was −4.58%, back to 217.54. Net on the week, from the August 21 close of 214.72, it gained 1.31%. A doubling of earnings and a beat produced a rounding error by Friday's bell. Name the session or the story changes completely.

Salesforce was the larger repricing and got far less attention. It ran +22.58% Thursday, 205.62 to 252.05, then +1.66% Friday to 256.24. Up 22.50% on the week. Intel ran +4.36% Thursday, gave back 2.85% Friday, and closed the week down 0.67%. CrowdStrike, Workday, Zoom and Intuit reported into the same window.

Sector proxies on the week, broker closes August 21 to August 28: XLK +1.29%, XLF +1.07%, XLE −1.56%, XLV −1.98%. We checked those ourselves because one search summary had health care, materials and energy leading with everything else red. Our bars say the opposite for two of the three, so we discarded the summary.

Energy and geopolitics: the strait, but from the other side

Crude fell this week on the story that has driven it up all summer. Brent traded around $88 a barrel through Thursday after three consecutive losing sessions and sat near $88.22 on Friday.

Al Jazeera and CNBC name the driver. Iran's military reached a revenue-sharing agreement with Oman over the Strait of Hormuz, raising the possibility that shipping disruption eases. Though Tehran stressed the arrangement does not guarantee an immediate reopening. Saudi Arabia is reported to be increasing loadings from Persian Gulf terminals as an alternative to Red Sea routes exposed to Houthi attacks. Pulling the other way, continued Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries and ports are disrupting that country's ability to export.

Our proxy tracks it. USO is an oil ETF, not WTI. It closed 129.70, −3.67% on the week and −0.24% Friday, but only +0.41% on the month, and still 22.63% above its own 200-day. That last number is the honest frame. A week of Hormuz optimism has not undone what the disruption did to the curve. XLE was −1.56% on the week, a milder move than crude's, as equity proxies usually are.

Month, quarter, year

Read the periods before the week.

August, month-to-date through the 28th, ran SPY +2.99%, QQQ +4.13%, IWM +1.56%. A good month for all three, following a July of SPY +0.03%, QQQ −6.57%, IWM −3.08%. Quarter-to-date the July hole is still visible, at SPY +3.02%, QQQ −2.71%, IWM −1.56%.

Year-to-date the ranking inverts entirely. IWM +20.65%, QQQ +16.90%, SPY +13.43%. The index with the worst week and the worst quarter leads the year. August dispersion between QQQ and IWM was 2.57 percentage points. Real, but a fraction of July's spread. A reader who saw only IWM's second red week would have the year exactly backwards.

The weekly frame

SPY sits 2.0% above its 10-week average (754.26) and 1.24% above its 8-week (759.95), with weekly momentum still positive and the red-week counter back to zero. QQQ is above both averages too, but its weekly MACD histogram is still negative at −2.76: price repaired faster than the momentum series did. IWM is the one below both, by about half a percent, with two red weeks behind it. Our SPY analog, two or more red weeks and a close under both averages, is not in effect this week. It has fired 12 times in the roughly 129 weeks we hold, a sample too small to forecast from, and IWM meets the same description without our having built a sample for it.

The daily tape

Friday's SPY candle is the speech, drawn. The session ranged 768.31 to 775.30 and closed 769.35, below the open, with a long upper tail taking half the range. The market traded up into the keynote and gave all of it back.

Underneath, the structure is intact but flattening. SPY closed on its 20-day average (769.22) and 2% above its 50-day (753.96). The 60-day range runs 716.58 to 779.37, so Friday's close sits ten points under the ceiling. A quiet tape by its own standard; an average day is now about four points.

QQQ closed just under its 20-day (717.94) and above its 50-day. IWM is the broken one: under its 10-, 20- and 50-day averages, its daily stochastic pinned at the floor of its range, and a close near the bottom of its 20-day band of 292.40 to 305.18.

So: SPY above every daily average it has, QQQ above all but the 20-day, IWM below all three short and intermediate ones. That is an index held up by a narrow set of names that just reported well, while the broad and rate-sensitive tail leaks. Our own breadth counter agrees from a different instrument. 246 of 584 names were up Friday, 42%, on a day the index fell only 0.23%. The average stock did worse than the index.

Open interest

Open interest only, never gamma; our options key carries no greeks. OCC book as of August 26, which lags and is not Friday's positioning.

The forward book is the August 31 expiry and the concentrations are large. Calls stack at 785 (37,066 contracts), then 797, 780 and 770. Puts sit at 760 (35,871), 730 (33,079), 755 and 745. Spot at 769.35 is between the 760 put shelf and the 770-to-785 call stack. Below 760, the next put strike with comparable size is 755, and then the book steps down to 745 and 730.

Cross-asset, all proxies

Labeled, because none of these is the thing itself.

Gold via GLD fell 3.24% Friday and 3.42% on the week, yet it is still +10.05% on the month and 5.91% over its 50-day. A hard Friday in gold alongside a hawkish keynote is consistent. The dollar proxy UUP rose 1.0% on the week, the cleanest cross-asset confirmation of the rate story. Long Treasuries via TLT were +1.01% on the week but −0.30% Friday, and IEF, the 7-to-10-year proxy, was flat. That is what a curve that moved at the front and not the belly looks like. VIXY, a VIX futures ETF and not spot VIX, rose 1.79% Friday and remains 33% below its 200-day.

Next week

Two calendars, kept separate.

From our audited local econ list: Nonfarm Payrolls (August data), Friday September 4, 08:30 ET. That list runs through October 2 and we do not add to it from memory.

We searched for an independent macro calendar and did not get a usable one. The schedule that came back placed Labor Day on Monday September 1, and September 1, 2026 is a Tuesday. It was describing a different year, so we dropped it. Check the BLS and BEA schedules directly; dates move.

From our local earnings cache, which covers semis only (13 symbols, cached June 29, so treat every date as scheduled): AVGO, Thursday September 3. That is the part we carry, not the week's slate.

What this sets up

The week's through-line was a market repricing toward higher policy rates, and every structural read above sits downstream of it. Small caps under all three short averages. The dollar proxy firmer. Gold down hard on the keynote morning. The front end of the curve moving while the long end did not.

Two things carry into next week. The first is payrolls on Friday, September 4, landing in a market that has already raised its bets on a September hike, eleven days ahead of the FOMC that would make it. The second is the August 31 expiry, where the 760 put shelf and the 770-to-785 call stack bracket a spot price sitting almost exactly on its 20-day average. If 760 gives, 755 is the next strike with size, and then the book thins to 745. If SPY holds its 20-day through the jobs print, the range ceiling at 779 is the level above it. Which of those happens is not ours to say. Where they are is.

What we don't carry

No dark-pool prints, no market-on-close imbalance, no spot VIX, no greeks, and no FOMC odds feed of our own. Where this letter says what is priced, that is reporting, not our measurement. Every proxy above is labeled, and where a source disagreed with our bars we printed both.

The Coil board

As of August 28, account mode DAY. The SPX book is names-on, agile, chop-capped: SPY plus 6 of 11 sectors open, 273 names fully qualified. The QQQ book is names-on, agile, day-trade: QQQ plus 3 of 6 sectors open, 46 names qualified. The macro layer reads RISK_OFF / defensive. Index structure broken, stand down on longs. As last week, the macro layer and the two names-on books disagree, and the board leaves that unresolved. Crypto is constructive: BTC 16.0% above its 200-day gate, 2 of 2 sleeves in, 39 of the 81 RH-tradable names above their own 200-day but only 3 of 81 advancing.

No returns are claimed here, and nothing above is a position.

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Read the board at coil.trade/scanner — from $19/mo.

This letter is impersonal research and market commentary. It is not investment advice, not a recommendation, and not tailored to anyone's circumstances. Nothing here is a forecast, target, or trade.

Sources — prices, levels, moving averages and returns: our own SIP daily and weekly bars, plus Robinhood broker quotes for Friday session and single-stock moves. Open interest: OCC, as of 2026-08-26. Macro, earnings and energy narrative: CNBC, CNN, NPR, Forbes, Kiplinger, Advisor Perspectives, CBS News, Al Jazeera, Yahoo Finance and Trading Economics, plus the Federal Reserve's July 28–29 FOMC statement.