Sentiment Heatmap — Week of August 31, 2026
AlphaAI classified 11,127 ticker-level sentiment reads across 8,651 news articles the week of August 31, 2026. Net tone came in at 35.5% bullish, matching the prior week to the decimal and sitting at the top of a range that has held between 29% and 36% since late July. Eleven of the twelve sectors finished positive, led by Energy at plus 69%. Consumer Defensive was the only sector in the red, and it was negative largely because of one antitrust investigation that names six of its companies at once.
News tone in the week of August 31 ran net 35.5% bullish across 11,127 scored ticker reads, identical to the prior week. Energy led at plus 69% on Venezuela licensing and SLB's $4.1 billion Kelvion deal. Consumer Defensive was the only negative sector at minus 25%, with 107 of its 234 bearish reads carrying one headline: the DOJ's expanded beef-price probe.
Energy took the top of the board on licensing and a cooling deal, while the AI build-out supplied the cleanest one-sided reads
Energy finished the week as the most bullish sector on the board at plus 69%, its 717 reads splitting 542 bullish to 44 bearish. Two events carried it. Chevron read 156 bullish against 3 bearish, the second-highest net of any company in the window, as it and a group including ONGC and GE Vernova moved toward signing final agreements in Venezuela; the same name's sale of its stakes in Angola's Block 14 to Etu Energias supplied most of what little bearish coverage it had. SLB read 41 to 1 on its $4.1 billion agreement to buy Kelvion, a cooling business whose customers include data centers, which is an energy-services deal the coverage framed as an AI-power story.
Technology was the largest sector by volume, 3,437 reads at plus 45%, and Nvidia was again the single most covered company: 452 reads, 401 of them bullish against 14 bearish. The concentration is worth noting because it fell. Nvidia took 4.1% of all ticker reads this week against 6.3% the week before, so the board is less dependent on one name than the prior issue's was. Its week ran on a $3.5 billion investment in MediaTek for an AI chip partnership and on continued coverage of its quarterly call, with a $3 billion commitment to SB Energy on the other side of the ledger.
The rest of the bullish leaderboard is an enterprise and infrastructure list. Dell read 118 to 6 after reporting record AI server orders and raising its outlook, with the bearish reads coming from pre-print notes that its 266% rally had raised the bar. Snowflake read 74 to 1 and jumped 22% on its own beat, GitLab 38 to 2, and CrowdStrike 55 to 8 on a beat and raised guidance, its handful of bearish reads arriving on a single risk-off day when a global bond rout and Zscaler's guidance pulled the whole security group down. Vertiv read 38 to 1 on a $1.45 billion acquisition of UtilityInnovation Group aimed at cutting data center power wait times, and Industrials finished at plus 52%.
Two unfamiliar tickers in the top ten were checked for syndication before publication, because a marketing wire repeated across lookalike domains can manufacture a leaderboard entry. Neither was one. Fervo Energy (37 to 1) signed a 396 MW geothermal power purchase agreement with Google for a Utah project, covered across 29 distinct domains. GoPro (56 to 2) announced a $285 million cash merger with Starman Optical and a pivot into data centers, with shares up 40%, covered across 54. Bitcoin read 101 to 41, and Cryptocurrency finished at plus 52%.
| Ticker | Company | Bull / bear reads | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVDA | Nvidia | 401 / 14 | +387 |
| CVX | Chevron | 156 / 3 | +153 |
| DELL | Dell Technologies | 118 / 6 | +112 |
| SNOW | Snowflake | 74 / 1 | +73 |
| BTC-USD | Bitcoin | 101 / 41 | +60 |
| GPRO | GoPro | 56 / 2 | +54 |
| CRWD | CrowdStrike | 55 / 8 | +47 |
| LLY | Eli Lilly | 45 / 5 | +40 |
| SLB | SLB | 41 / 1 | +40 |
| VRT | Vertiv Holdings | 38 / 1 | +37 |
| GTLB | GitLab | 38 / 2 | +36 |
| FRVO | Fervo Energy | 37 / 1 | +36 |
One antitrust investigation put an entire sector in the red, and it is the clearest example yet of a macro story counted six times
Consumer Defensive finished at minus 25%, the only negative sector this week and the weakest sector reading in this series so far: 462 reads, 120 bullish against 234 bearish. Almost half of those bearish reads trace to a single event. The Department of Justice expanded its beef-price investigation to eight major retailers, and that story names Walmart, Kroger, Albertsons, Costco, Amazon and Tyson inside the same article, so one event produces one read per company. Across the window, 153 ticker reads carry a beef or meat-price headline, and 107 of Consumer Defensive's 234 bearish reads are among them. That is worth stating plainly rather than dressing up as six independent company stories: the sector's red print is mostly one legal docket entry, distributed across the shelf it touches.
The sector had genuinely company-specific bad news underneath it too. Campbell's read 0 bullish to 49 bearish after a fourth-quarter miss that dropped the stock 6%, with coverage centered on margin pressure and cautious guidance. Tyson read 0 to 22 as it revised its 2026 outlook on what it called beef pressures, which is the same cost story from the producer side. Kroger read 0 to 27 and Albertsons 3 to 23, both carrying the probe and little else.
Consumer Cyclical escaped the red by three points and two names explain why it came close. Lululemon read 1 bullish to 97 bearish, the most one-sided reading of the week in either direction, after missing second-quarter sales expectations and cutting guidance, with the stock down about 15%. Amazon read 33 to 86 on a combination of the reported FTC lawsuit over advertiser pricing, the beef probe and a Senate panel inquiry. One caveat on Amazon's negative pile: it also contains an evergreen headline recycling an older quarter, which does not change the direction but is the kind of artifact worth naming.
Utilities finished barely positive at plus 10% because PG&E read 11 to 50 as California's wildfire-liability compromise fell short of what utilities wanted, prompting a BofA downgrade and a reported $2 billion cut in planned spending, with Edison International down 18 net on the same bill. The pattern across all of it shows in the category cut: regulation was the only negative news category of the week at minus 29% over 1,139 reads, against technology at plus 70% and mergers and acquisitions at plus 66%. The bearish engine this week was the legal and regulatory docket, not the tape.
| Ticker | Company | Bull / bear reads | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| LULU | Lululemon Athletica | 1 / 97 | -96 |
| AMZN | Amazon.com | 33 / 86 | -53 |
| CPB | Campbell's | 0 / 49 | -49 |
| PCG | PG&E | 11 / 50 | -39 |
| KR | Kroger | 0 / 27 | -27 |
| TSN | Tyson Foods | 0 / 22 | -22 |
| COST | Costco Wholesale | 5 / 25 | -20 |
| ACI | Albertsons Companies | 3 / 23 | -20 |
| FICO | Fair Isaac | 0 / 20 | -20 |
| WMT | Walmart | 15 / 33 | -18 |
| EIX | Edison International | 5 / 23 | -18 |
| RARE | Ultragenyx Pharmaceutical | 0 / 18 | -18 |
Methodology
Covers every enriched news article published between August 31 and September 6, 2026 that AlphaAI scored at relevance 6 or higher, the same floor used for the per-stock sentiment strips on the site, excluding SEC Form 4 insider filings, whose templated text is almost always neutral. The remaining sample is 10,693 reads from general news, 409 from SEC 8-K filings and 25 from SEC 6-K filings. For each article, AlphaAI assigns a sentiment of positive, neutral or negative to every company it identifies, and only tickers that pass enricher validation are counted. A 'ticker read' is one such per-ticker label, so an article naming six companies contributes up to six reads and a market-wide or sector-wide story is counted once for each ticker it tags; the beef-price investigation described above is exactly that case, and it is the reason Consumer Defensive's reading should be read as one event rather than six. Net tone is bullish reads minus bearish reads as a share of all reads for that group. Sectors come from each company's classification, which 99.4% of reads carry, and a sector needs at least 15 reads in the window to appear on the chart. Crypto assets such as bitcoin sit in the Cryptocurrency sector, while crypto-adjacent equities such as exchanges are classified under their own equity sectors, mostly financials. The two ticker leaderboards rank strictly by net reads, bullish minus bearish, among names with at least 4 reads, so a name absent from them scored below the ones shown. No company on either leaderboard had a second listed share class or venue in the window, so no rows were combined this week. One caveat on the totals: weekly article volume moves with both the news cycle and our collector coverage, and this window ran about 6% lighter than the prior one, so compare the percentages across issues, not the raw volumes. This is a filtered readout of public news coverage, not investment advice or a measure of price performance.
Sources: AlphaAI enriched news feed, GDELT Project (global news index), SEC EDGAR Form 8-K filings
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