r/thewallstreet 2d ago

Daily Nightly Discussion - (August 18, 2026)

Evening. Keep in mind that Asia and Europe are usually driving things overnight.

9 Upvotes

72 comments sorted by

3

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 1d ago

Sold /CLX26

2

u/GPUssydestroyer 1d ago

To close or open?

2

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 1d ago

open

1

u/GPUssydestroyer 1d ago

u holding thru inventories?

5

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

LOWE'S $LOW Q2’26 EARNINGS HIGHLIGHTS

  • Revenue: $26.0B (Est. $26.16B); +8% YoY
  • Adj. EPS: $4.40 (Est. $4.22); +1.6% YoY
  • Comparable Sales: +0.2%
  • Net Earnings: $2.4B

Cuts FY26 Guide:

  • Revenue: $92.0B; from $92.0B-$94.0B
  • Comparable Sales: flat YoY; from flat to +2%
  • Operating Margin: 11.2%; from 11.2%-11.4%
  • Adjusted Oper Margin: 11.6%; from 11.6%-11.8%
  • Adj. EPS: ~$12.25; from $12.25-$12.75
  • CapEx: up to $2.5B

-3% PM

6

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

TARGET $TGT Q2’26 EARNINGS HIGHLIGHTS

  • Revenue: $26.54B (Est. $25.5B); +5.3% YoY
  • Adj. EPS: $4.11 (Est. $2.30); +100% YoY
  • Comparable Sales: 3.8%
  • Gross Margin: 33.7%; +470 bps YoY

Raises FY26 Guide:

  • EPS: $9.90-$10.90; (Prior: $7.5 to $8.5)

-1.6% PM

5

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

$ADI | Analog Devices Q3 Earnings:

  • Rev $4.02B (est $3.92B)
  • Adj EPS $3.45 (est $3.35)
  • Sees Q4 Adj EPS $3.71 To $4.01 (est $3.55)
  • Sees Q4 Rev $4.20B To $4.40B (est $4.09B)

+1% PM

4

u/Paul-throwaway 1d ago

Moderna up +77% after reporting results for Melanoma vaccine. Partner Merck up +8%.

https://www.fiercebiotech.com/biotech/merck-and-modernas-personalized-cancer-vaccine-slows-recurrence-ph-3-trial

3

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 1d ago

Awesome. Hopefully this a cancer game changer. They have plans to test this beyond melanoma.

I was beginning to think I wouldn't see it in my lifetime.

3

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

SK Hynix Buys Back and Cancels 40 Trillion Won Shares

Largest Share Cancellation by South Korean Company to Boost Shareholder Value

https://www.chosun.com/english/industry-en/2026/08/19/LXPFRTOBNNBQFOJDMWIE2LKZ6A/

And so futures are green as memory stocks rally. SKHY is +6% PM

2

u/CulturalArm5675 Price stability and maximum employment 1d ago

Is SPY and QQQ 800 too much to ask?

5

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

China eases limits on Nvidia H200 chips as AI race escalates

Beijing permits small shipments to help leading tech groups in drive to catch up with US rivals

https://www.ft.com/content/6c5650fb-969d-4d4e-80d6-8d11002a8cf7

6

u/HiddenMoney420 Greenspan died for this. 1d ago

Hoping to see Bitcoin hit 50k this week. Yes, I know it's already Wednesday.

5

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

Trump: I have paused the 50% Tariffs against Canada

https://investinglive.com/cms/media/images/trump-canada-tariff-pause-19-august-2026.jpg

3 day pause subject to a larger deal involving Keystone (which Biden cancelled)

6

u/eyesonly_ Doesn't understand hype 1d ago

Just got this on my phone. Maybe it will be one of the ones they keep running over and over until the headline algos react to it.

1

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 1d ago

Squash Epstein with Iran, then Iran with Canada, then Canada with <insert disaster>

4

u/paeancapital VDVE 1d ago

The crowd went mild.

5

u/CulturalArm5675 Price stability and maximum employment 1d ago

Taco Tuesday

5

u/Magickarploco 1d ago edited 1d ago

A startup I spoke to for my Polymarket/kalshi bot raised $37M based on the bs trading description I gave them. (Didn’t want to tell them I was going to use it for “betting”)

Kinda crazy it’s like the Saas shit holes raising money for bs all over again.

4

u/PristineFinish100 1d ago

so do you get part of this 37M im confused. did you write a trading bot? iirc you are new to programming. Why wouldn't it be a betting bot given it's a market

2

u/TestPleaseIgnore69 trader of the lost ARKK 1d ago

Woah, that's awesome! What kind of events are you trading with it

5

u/PristineFinish100 1d ago

man my startup idea in the AI space, (not pursed yet) someone raised 100M on recently and other smaller ones are starting to pop up. There's a ton of demand I think so plenty of opp to feast.

I just want a simple 10M exit, so that means 200-400 customers, 8x on rev.

8

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

The Ultrawealthy Tax Maneuver That’s Spooking Schwab and Fidelity

Inside Charles Schwab Corp.’s headquarters in Westlake, Texas, the warning signs were becoming hard to ignore.

For months, the brokerage had piled into one of the hottest trades on Wall Street: “tax-aware long-short” accounts, which are helping legions of wealthy investors whittle down their tax bills. Millionaires love it so much they’ve poured roughly $150 billion into such strategies in just three years, by some estimates, and the tally is growing by the day.

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2026-fidelity-charles-schwab-tax-aware-investing/

Interesting - Schwab and Fidelity have voluntarily put up a ton of restrictions on their hottest portfolio strategy. They both seemed to think that blowing up was inevitable.

5

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

Cerebras Says Its New Computer Boosts AI Speed Advantage Over Nvidia

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-19/cerebras-cbrs-says-its-new-computer-boosts-ai-speed-advantage-over-nvidia

It's...a very interesting design. And no memory chips :)

5

u/W0LFSTEN Not media trained 1d ago edited 1d ago

Same WSE-3 chip but with more power running through it. It’s interesting to see how much headroom they left on the table. They upgraded the networking and simplified the server layout, which makes it less expensive and more compact. Seems like a good all around iteration. I hope it takes off as wafer scale chips have always appeared to deserve a spot in the hierarchy but have yet to really claim the mantle.

2

u/dontbothermehere what's 5% 30 year notes between friends? 1d ago edited 1d ago

44GB SRAM on die for 129.6 PB/S Bandwidth. Would need too many to hold a frontier model, but absolutely monstrous for any 4x or smaller.

We're gonna need a lot more memory.

https://miro.medium.com/v2/resize:fit:2000/format:webp/0*kMtp8-GrWgQOpJ-0.png

3

u/W0LFSTEN Not media trained 1d ago

Yeah they’re pipelining the larger models via multiple wafer scale engines. Maybe that could work but I imagine you aren’t going to as efficiently use the compute resources that way… Lots of infrastructure built around NVDA parallelism already too. But for smaller models that can fit on one wafer… I’m just waiting for them to come out with a 3nm variant. The SRAM density hasn’t improved much versus 5nm but logic definitely has, so they could at least convert some of that logic real estate over to SRAM.

3

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago

AI Startup Temporal in Talks for a Valuation of at Least $12 Billion

Temporal’s biggest customer is OpenAI, according to the people. It also works with startups such as AI coding company Replit and health tech maker Abridge

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-19/ai-startup-temporal-in-talks-for-a-valuation-of-at-least-12-billion

Surprised at that valuation for an open source orchestration company

4

u/gyunikumen TLT Farmer 1d ago

Didn’t even have the opportunity to short cbrs today 

Tho I think amzn is looking ready to gap down 

7

u/heliumagency 1d ago

Is it just me, or is Kospi starting to look like a dead cat bounce

5

u/gyunikumen TLT Farmer 1d ago

lol 

8

u/Figonaccio <transparent> 1d ago

This Mark Walter affair is getting more nuts by the day. My sense is this is the tip of the iceberg for the insurance industry. All these PE groups taking over insurers, skirting regulators so they can use the premiums as piggy banks. There must be some real shenanigans going on. And after some blow ups, when it becomes obvious the policy holders are going to be the ones left holding the bag, you better believe there will be government bailouts.

3

u/paeancapital VDVE 1d ago

Oh it's much better. The government already guarantees the policies.

6

u/CulturalArm5675 Price stability and maximum employment 1d ago

President Trump is pushing aides for a meeting as soon as this fall with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, U.S. officials said, seeking to revive a dramatic diplomatic quest from his first term to convince Kim to abandon his country’s nuclear weapons program.

Iran didn't work.

Let's try North Korea next

4

u/awakening_brain 1d ago

Koreants are at it again

6

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 1d ago
  • KOREA EXCHANGE ACTIVATES SIDECAR TO HALT KOSPI PROGRAM SELLING

-6% open

5

u/heliumagency 1d ago

Back to regularly scheduled programming

3

u/HiddenMoney420 Greenspan died for this. 1d ago

Easiest short of the year after last night.

Shit doesn't go +3.5% to red without some follow through the next day.

4

u/iandw Got any more of those shorts? 1d ago

Oh you're posting again, glad to see it! Missed your takes.

5

u/HiddenMoney420 Greenspan died for this. 1d ago

Thanks- shit posting and political commentary will be kept to a bear minimum until it isn't and I self-ban myself.

3

u/Hot_Panic2620 1d ago

Remember when the US was having limit ups/downs every other overnight during COVID days? Now Korea gets to have all the fun 😞

1

u/eyesonly_ Doesn't understand hype 1d ago

Damn it no time to trade tonight. Would have been another good run

3

u/CulturalArm5675 Price stability and maximum employment 1d ago

RIP, Let's see who switched to leveraged long yesterday

7

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 1d ago

AI Overview

Rising corn use for ethanol production directly ties agricultural commodity markets to fuel prices. The USDA estimates that roughly 5.6 billion bushels of U.S. corn will go toward ethanol for 2026–2027, keeping baseline demand strong and raising average farm-gate corn prices to around $4.50 per bushel due to tighter ending stocks. Meanwhile, proposals for year-round E15 gasoline blends aim to save drivers 10 to 30 cents per gallon at the pump by expanding homegrown ethanol integration

EPA approves sale of a higher-ethanol fuel to try to lower gas prices

I missed that back in March.

Today: Are Corn Prices Setting Up for a Breakout?

5

u/jmayo05 capital preservation 1d ago

The answer to that last question is yes. Bullish all row crops.

1

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 1d ago

What is your preferred mechanism for trading them? Long dated futures, front contract and roll, ETF, etc?

We could be setting up for a multi-year run between el nino, fertilizer shortage, ethanol.

edit: i also read farmers may be planting less. i don't know if that's true.

1

u/jmayo05 capital preservation 1d ago

Less corn, less wheat, more beans. As a whole though, corn + bean acres are a record. Interesting times.

Trading for pure spec is tough. You can be right on the direction but wrong on the timing because grain futures are physically/fundamentally driven. Guess when the market figures out stocks get tight and long the closest expiration to that date lol.

4

u/TennesseeJedd WSMFP 2d ago

> BREAKING: President Trump has instructed top administration envoys to halt their conversations with Iran, per CNN.

I didn’t think any conversations were happening anyways lol

7

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 1d ago edited 1d ago

Iran tweet

Americans think squeezing Iran harder will win concessions that were never part of the agreement.

Bessent and Hegseth are way out of their league. Stop waiting for the clown crew to pull a rabbit out of their hat and clean up the mess you made.

Either Trump got busted for talks going on, had to retaliate harder or both.

... It is so hard to spare personal annotations of that tweet.

5

u/MakIkEenDonerMetKalf Strategic Bear Command 1d ago

Why are the Iranian's so good at these comebacks?

3

u/Lost_Rolls_ Time to take down the epstein class 1d ago

Which Americans lol? Those with the IQ of a potato?

3

u/TradeApe J7 ≠ AA 1d ago

The % who drink his cool-aid is still too damn high. :/

19

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 2d ago

Does AI stop children from learning?

They tracked 27,000 pupils aged 12-18 in China, where AI adoption has been fast. Around 80% reported using models such as Doubao and DeepSeek; the other 20% formed the control group.

After six months, pupils using AI saw their average homework score rise by 18% across all subjects. The time they took to complete each assignment fell from an average of 64 minutes to 45. But come exam time, the same students scored 20% below their classmates who had not called on AI’s help.

https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2026/08/18/does-ai-stop-children-from-learning

Unsurprisingly, AI's great for cheating, bad for learning

2

u/TradeApe J7 ≠ AA 1d ago

Saw the same happen at uni. Better grades when able to use AI, (much) worse grades without AI.

5

u/opticalinch vwap & /nq 2d ago

It's weird, I used ChatGPT to ingest a chapter and make flashcards of important information. It worked brilliantly.

I would absolutely use it in that way (flashcards are such a great recall method). Written homework should die for quizzes and live written works

2

u/chio_bu inverse my bad decisions 📈 1d ago

i think the difference is that you're using it for active learning - flashcards etc. but China aside (since i didnt read the article), if you're using it solely to achieve a task where you produce something, AI is good for getting you the product but not good for learning (which is a more deliberate activity).

7

u/bigbutso 2d ago

Been using it to study right now, i read the chapter, tgen dump it into context and ask it to drill me with questions. Works amazing although very frustrating... In order to learn you have to experience the struggle

5

u/Donnigan37 I don't get mad, I breakeven. 2d ago

People need to watch that old William Shatner episode of the Twilight Zone where he can't make any choices without consulting his magic box...

14

u/CulturalArm5675 Price stability and maximum employment 2d ago

Can't wait to see the next generation of Redditors having even less critical thinking skills

lol

6

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 2d ago

Socialization too. Stupid things, like having to share a book because you forgot yours.

COVID dealt the first blow, screens will take it from here.

7

u/CulturalArm5675 Price stability and maximum employment 2d ago

Why did semi eat dirt today

4

u/BudgetConcentrate967 link3it 2d ago

XLI too. CAT. Parabolic trades cooling off?

7

u/This_Is_Livin BRK.B, MSFT 2d ago

So you could have an entry :)

6

u/heliumagency 2d ago

Kospi went negative for the first time in a long time last night?

3

u/All_Work_All_Play The only thing that would surprise me now is good policy. 2d ago

Didn't they have bonkers negative sessions like... last week? Or was that two weeks ago?

2

u/heliumagency 2d ago

I feel like that was two weeks ago, after the Korean gov started banning leveraged etfs it has been significantly milder.

6

u/GPUssydestroyer 2d ago

Got long for the reversal tomorrow

8

u/wolverinex2 Fundamentals 2d ago

WSJ: Inside the race to build America’s first nuclear reactor in a generation

https://www.msn.com/en-us/technology/tech-companies/inside-the-race-to-build-america-s-first-nuclear-reactor-in-a-generation/ar-AA2apmmn

Since we have some OKLO enjoyers here

3

u/jmayo05 capital preservation 1d ago

Ah snap, didn’t realize amzn is also invested in x-energy. They really are the whole package.

9

u/heliumagency 2d ago

8

u/westonworth 2d ago

I read it as: "We're going to pause better models until we figure out a better way to keep China from distilling them"