Sentiment Heatmap — Week of August 3, 2026

Palantir, Caterpillar and a defense tape made this the broadest week in the series

Palantir opened the week with the most lopsided read of any widely covered name, 192 bullish reads against 7, after second-quarter revenue rose 93% and the company raised guidance again. Coverage put the stock up 12.5% on the print and 20% by the following session. Nvidia followed at 143 bullish to 9, and almost none of that came from its own numbers: the reads were about other companies' spending, including a $10 billion computing deal Anthropic signed with a new cloud startup and SpaceX choosing Nvidia over AMD for its next build. Caterpillar was the cleanest read of the week, 106 bullish reads and not one bearish, on record revenue of $20.5 billion, a 10% jump in the shares and a raised 2026 growth target that coverage tied directly to data-center construction. Amazon passed a $3 trillion market cap on the continuing AWS rally, and Disney was the second name in the top eight with zero bearish reads, on a quarterly beat carried by theme parks, streaming profit and Toy Story 5.

Industrials at net plus 48% topped this heatmap for the first time, and defense contracting supplied much of it. The Pentagon signed about $3 billion of deals to expand Patriot and THAAD interceptor production, Northrop Grumman's share was described as a $1 billion agreement to quadruple THAAD output, and Rocket Lab won a $397 million Space Force contract for satellites that track airborne threats. Boeing finally got the 737 MAX 7 certified for production and gained 5% on it, then drew the other side of its 76 to 31 split when the FAA ordered crack inspections on hundreds of MAX jets later in the week. Healthcare ran a near-identical plus 47%, on Eli Lilly raising full-year guidance into surging GLP-1 demand and Moderna winning FDA approval for the first mRNA flu vaccine. Software earnings were the other engine: Atlassian jumped 23% on its results and coverage two days later put the move above 30%, Cloudflare rose 15% on a raised outlook, Shopify beat on every line it reports, and Airbnb added 9%. Energy's plus 47% was mostly BP, whose quarterly profit doubled to $5.7 billion after the oil price surge.

Meta's courtroom week, a salmonella outbreak, and the beats that read bearish

Meta was the most bearish name for a second week running, 102 bearish reads against 27, for a completely different reason than the previous week's cash burn. A court ordered it to pay nearly $1 billion in what coverage called a landmark child-safety loss, New Mexico's attorney general secured $567 million into a children's mental-health fund, and a California prohibition on addictive feeds for minors survived a challenge from the social platforms. That is also most of the reason regulation was the only news category to finish net negative, at minus 16%, in a week when no sector did. Communication Services was still the weakest sector for a third straight week, but at plus 7% it was positive, because Disney, Snap's 10% jump on an earnings beat and regulatory clearances for the Paramount takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery outweighed Meta and the ad-tech names.

The consumer damage was food safety, not demand. Chipotle went from raising its full-year sales forecast a week earlier to 53 bearish reads against 2, after a salmonella outbreak tied to jalapeños widened to 15 states. Sweetgreen cut its 2026 same-store sales outlook to a decline of 7% to 8% from a prior 2% to 4% forecast on cyclospora fears. Lucid fell about 10% as its second-quarter loss widened and coverage read its announced operational reset as a turnaround that had not landed. Apple stayed on the bearish list a second week, with supply limits hitting its revenue outlook and a four-day loss passing 10%. AstraZeneca slid 7% on reports it was in talks to buy Bristol Myers Squibb in a roughly $400 billion merger that analysts quoted in the coverage called odd.

The sharpest disconnect of the week was in memory and infrastructure software, where good results read badly. The Trade Desk drew 46 bearish reads and not a single bullish one, the mirror image of Caterpillar's week, after second-quarter revenue of $715.1 million missed a $752.6 million estimate and the stock fell 19%. Western Digital and Sandisk both beat and both fell, on coverage about lofty expectations eclipsing strong earnings; Sandisk finished 51 bearish to 30 in the same week it forecast upbeat revenue on AI demand. Datadog posted its largest drop on record on a gross-margin disappointment even after raising its forecast, and AppLovin fell 20% on a top-line miss. The clearest case was the most covered ticker of the week: AMD drew 226 reads and produced no verdict at all, 94 bullish to 73, because data-center revenue more than doubled into a record quarter and the stock still fell on a capital-spending surge and on losing SpaceX to Nvidia. SpaceX itself was fourth most covered at 174 reads, in its first quarter as a public company, beating revenue estimates and falling 11% on what one headline called the cost of becoming an AI giant.