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

Two things happened this week and they pulled in opposite directions. 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 and the party gave a chunk of itself back 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, released August 26 — 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 rather than 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: +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: +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 rather than print it.

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.

The driver, per Al Jazeera and CNBC: 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 — an oil ETF, not WTI — 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 reading the week.

August, month-to-date through the 28th: 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: 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 SMA (754.26) and 1.24% above its 8-week EMA (759.95), weekly MACD histogram positive at +0.83, weekly RSI 64.5, weekly stochastic high at K 84.0 / D 85.8. The red-week counter reset to zero.

QQQ is above both weekly averages too — +0.96% and +0.56% — but its weekly MACD histogram is negative at −2.76, weekly RSI 58.1. Above the averages, weekly momentum still rolling.

IWM is the one actually below: −0.49% against its 10-week SMA, −0.37% against its 8-week EMA, two red weeks behind it.

Our SPY historical analog — two or more red weeks and below both weekly averages — is not in effect this week, so there is nothing to quote from it. That condition has occurred 12 times in the ~129-week window we hold: a small sample over roughly two and a half years, which we describe and never forecast from. IWM currently satisfies the same description, and we have not computed a separate sample for it, so we will not imply one.

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 51% of the range. The market traded up into the keynote and gave all of it back.

Structure underneath is intact but flattening. SPY sits +0.26% over its 10-day, +0.02% over its 20-day (769.22 — effectively on it), +2.04% over its 50-day and +8.76% over its 200-day, with the 20/50 spread marginally wider at +2.02%. Daily MACD histogram −0.96, RSI 56.7, stochastic 42.2 / 39.3. ATR14 is 4.37, 0.57% of price — quiet by its own recent standard. The 60-day range is 716.58 to 779.37; the 20-day range 748.80 to 779.37.

QQQ closed 716.43, 0.21% below its 20-day (717.94) while holding above its 10-day, 50-day and 200-day. Daily RSI 51.9, MACD histogram −0.49, ATR 6.86 (0.96%). Its 60-day range runs 661.14 to 745.45.

IWM is the broken one: 295.75, below its 10-day (−1.26%), 20-day (−1.50%) and 50-day (−0.53%), still +9.31% over its 200-day. Daily RSI 45.4, and daily stochastic %K at 0.8 — pinned at the floor of its 14-day range, %D 19.4. Its 20-day range is 292.40 to 305.18, and Friday closed nearer the bottom.

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 level held up by a narrow set of names that just reported well while the broad rate-sensitive tail leaks. Our own board's breadth counter agrees from a different instrument — 246 of 584 names up Friday, 42.1%. Not a rout, but on a session where the index fell 0.23% it says the average stock did worse than the index.

Open interest

Strikes and contract counts only. Not gamma — our options key carries no greeks, and our own July research found max-pain and GEX evidence mis-cited often enough that we print neither. OCC open interest as of August 26, which lags and is therefore not Friday's book.

The August 28 expiry cleared today: largest call OI at 770 (15,511 contracts) with 780 at 10,805; largest put OI at 750 (18,313) with 735 at 12,908.

The forward book is the August 31 expiry, where concentrations are much larger. Calls: 785 with 37,066 contracts, then 797 at 22,860, 780 at 18,060, 770 at 11,830. Puts: 760 with 35,871, then 730 at 33,079, 755 at 23,222, 745 at 22,058. Structurally, spot at 769.35 sits between the 760 put concentration below and the 770/780/785 call stack above; below 760 the next put strike with comparable size is 755, then a large step down to 745 and 730.

Cross-asset, all proxies

Labeled, because none of these is the thing itself.

Gold via GLD closed 408.89: −3.24% Friday alone, −3.42% on the week, yet +10.05% on the month and +5.91% over its 50-day while sitting 1.42% below its 200-day. A hard Friday in gold alongside a hawkish keynote is consistent; the month is still strongly positive.

The dollar proxy UUP closed 28.18, +0.57% Friday, +1.00% on the week, +0.04% on the month, +2.11% over its 200-day — the cleanest cross-asset confirmation of the rate story.

Long Treasuries via TLT: 82.88, −0.30% Friday, +1.01% on the week, +1.17% on the month, 2.51% below its 200-day. IEF, the 7–10 year proxy, was +0.03% on the week — which is what a curve that moved at the front and not the belly looks like.

VIXY — a VIX futures ETF, not spot VIX, which we do not carry — closed 17.66: +1.79% Friday, −3.02% on the week, −13.90% on the month, 33.17% 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 entries to it from memory.

We also 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, and note that dates move.

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

The September 15–16 FOMC meeting is the calendar item everything above points at.

What we don't carry

Stated every week, because the gaps matter as much as the data: no dark-pool prints, no market-on-close imbalance, no spot VIX / VIX1D / VVIX, no true gamma or greeks, and no FOMC probability feed of our own — where this letter says what is priced, that is other people's reporting, not our measurement. Our prices are SIP bars, with Robinhood broker quotes verifying Friday's single-stock and sector moves. Every proxy above is labeled. 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; the board does not resolve that and neither will we. 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 — $12/mo · own the engine outright — $79 one-time.

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.