Sentiment Heatmap — Week of August 24, 2026

Nvidia's print drew a quarter of its weekly coverage in one day, and the enterprise software beats kept coming

Nvidia was the most covered company of the week by a wide margin: 731 ticker reads, 6.3% of everything scored, 550 of them bullish against 87 bearish for a net plus 63%. The concentration is worth reading carefully. On August 27, the day of its earnings report, the name drew 314 reads at plus 85%, against 72 to 118 reads on each of the other weekdays and under 35 across the weekend. That single day was not one story repeated: those 314 reads came from 258 distinct stories on 139 domains, and across the full week the name was covered in 601 distinct stories on 240 domains. The volume is genuine breadth of coverage, not a syndication network. The rest of Nvidia's week ran on two other threads: reported talks to invest in Perplexity at a valuation above $30 billion, and a $6 billion licensing deal with Poolside to train open-weight models.

Enterprise software supplied the cleanest one-sided reads on the board. Salesforce finished 140 bullish against a single bearish read after an earnings beat that lifted the stock 11%, raised annual forecasts and an expanded AI partnership with Anthropic. CrowdStrike read 112 to 4 on its own beat and raised outlook, with coverage noting record annual recurring revenue and a ninth consecutive quarterly beat. Okta drew 54 bullish reads and no bearish ones at all after topping estimates and popping 19%, with several outlets tying the demand to AI-driven identity threats. Retail earnings landed in the same direction even though the consumer sector as a whole did not: Dollar General (47 bullish to 2), Williams-Sonoma (42 to 2) and Abercrombie & Fitch (41 to 2) each beat and raised full-year guidance in the same week that Consumer Cyclical finished second from the bottom of the sector board.

Healthcare's plus 46% rested on two events. Moderna (71 bullish to 13) and Merck (45 to 5) shared a second week of coverage of their jointly developed cancer vaccine clearing its Phase 3 readout, a story that also led the prior week's board. Eli Lilly read 60 to 4 after the FDA cleared the Alzheimer's blood test it developed with Roche. In crypto, the most bullish sector at plus 68%, bitcoin read 143 to 14 as it moved through $79,000 and then $80,000 on spot ETF inflows and a weaker dollar, and Solana read 60 to 2 as the Bitwise Solana ETF crossed $1 billion and validators passed the network's first governance vote.

One settlement held a whole sector down, and the rest of the bearish table was company-specific

Communication Services was the only sector to finish negative, at minus 5%, and it was negative because of Meta alone. The company read 54 bullish against 172 bearish, a net minus 40%, on its agreement to pay up to $16.68 billion to settle state claims that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users, a deal that coverage said will also force changes to both products. Those 172 bearish reads came from 140 distinct domains out of the 199 that mentioned the company at all, so this is one story covered very widely rather than a wire release recycled. Strip Meta out and the sector reads plus 15%, which would put it mid-pack rather than at the bottom of the board. Warner Bros. Discovery supplied most of the remaining weight, 8 bullish to 39 bearish, after California's attorney general cancelled a planned meeting on the Paramount Skydance deal citing a lack of good faith.

Everything else on the bearish leaderboard traces to a single company event rather than a shared theme. Dick's Sporting Goods read 1 bullish to 56 bearish after cutting its annual forecasts on weakening demand, in what several outlets called its worst single-day decline in three years. Intuit read 16 to 62 despite revenue growth of 14% to $21.4 billion, because its annual guidance came in below estimates. PayPal read 2 to 45 after Advent and Stripe were reported to have abandoned a $50 billion pursuit of the company. Boston Scientific read 2 to 37 on a cyberattack that disrupted its operations. Alibaba read 33 to 63 as a $10 billion Hong Kong share sale to fund AI spending knocked the stock 8%. Consumer Cyclical finished at plus 11%, second from the bottom, but the weakness was not sector-wide. Dick's alone was minus 55 net reads, and Lucid, General Motors, Wendy's and Rivian added another minus 72 between them, while Williams-Sonoma and Abercrombie & Fitch sat in the same sector raising full-year guidance. Read by category rather than sector, regulation was the weakest bucket at minus 22%, which is where most of the Meta settlement coverage landed, and macro coverage was the only other negative one at minus 12%.