Sentiment Heatmap — Week of September 7, 2026
AlphAI classified 9,859 ticker-level sentiment reads across 7,949 news articles the week of September 7, 2026. Net tone came in at 36.4% bullish, the sixth straight week inside a narrow 35 to 36.5 percent band. All twelve sectors finished positive for the first time since this series began in July, led by Energy at plus 57%. It was also the lightest week of the series by volume, 11% under the prior one, and reads have now fallen six weeks running.
News tone in the week of September 7 ran net 36.4% bullish across 9,859 scored ticker reads, and all twelve sectors finished positive for the first time in this series. Energy led at plus 57%. The worst reading belonged to Novartis at minus 63, where a single failed Phase III trial supplied a third of healthcare's bearish reads.
Every sector finished green for the first time in this series, and four of the top rows are one supply-chain story rather than four
All twelve sectors ended the week net positive, which has not happened in the seven issues of this series. Energy led at plus 57% on 519 reads splitting 347 bullish to 49 bearish. Technology was both the largest sector by volume and the second most bullish, 3,023 reads at plus 53%. The floor moved up rather than the ceiling: the weakest sector, Consumer Defensive, still finished at plus 7% (335 reads, 129 bullish to 107 bearish), where a week earlier it was the only negative sector on the board at minus 25%. Overall net tone of 36.4% is the sixth consecutive reading between 35.0% and 36.5%, so the all-green result is a broadening, not a jump in level.
Apple posted the highest net of any company, 306 reads at 165 bullish to 24 bearish. The coverage ran on the foldable iPhone Duo at $1,999, the first launch event under CEO John Ternus, the iPhone 18 Pro, a Morgan Stanley note sizing the foldable opportunity at $14 billion, and a $30 billion US chip agreement with Mac mini production moving onshore. Nvidia read 150 to 29 on a $12.9 billion acquisition of Hugging Face, reported talks to put up to $10 billion into Anthropic's IPO, and $3.5 billion into MediaTek; its one consistent bearish thread was director Mark Stevens selling about 2 million shares. Oracle read 132 to 25 after a first quarter in which cloud infrastructure revenue more than doubled, alongside a $20 billion at-the-market program and a $40 billion plan, with the bearish reads centered on the absence of a free cash flow timeline.
Four more names in the top ten are the same event seen from four balance sheets, and they should be read that way. ASML (plus 54), Intel (plus 47), Samsung Electronics (plus 44) and TSMC (plus 44) all rose on High-NA EUV lithography: ASML winning EUV orders from both TSMC and Samsung, Intel claiming a production lead with the technology and trading up about 5%, and Samsung expanding its partnership with ASML. That is one capital equipment decision producing four leaderboard rows, not four independent bull cases. Qualcomm (70 bullish to 4) rounds out the semiconductor block. Outside chips, Chevron read 45 to 2 on a $7 billion five-year Venezuela investment with a doubled rig count and a 600,000 barrel per day target, and GE Aerospace read 44 to 0 on an $11.75 billion acquisition of turbine-blade maker CPP funded with $4.75 billion of new debt.
Concentration was the lowest of the series. The single most covered name, Apple, took 3.10% of all ticker reads, against 4.1% for the top name a week earlier and 6.3% the week before that, so this board depends less on one company than any previous issue. Unfamiliar names on the leaderboard were screened for syndication before publication, because a marketing wire repeated across lookalike domains can manufacture an entry. AeroVironment (38 bullish to 4) came from 31 distinct domains with 47 distinct headlines, covering a record first quarter at $480.5 million in revenue, a $1.5 billion funded backlog, a $464.8 million Army laser award and a first international LOCUST export order. GameStop, NextEra and NuScale were checked the same way and were clean.
| Ticker | Company | Bull / bear reads | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| AAPL | Apple | 165 / 24 | +141 |
| NVDA | Nvidia | 150 / 29 | +121 |
| ORCL | Oracle | 132 / 25 | +107 |
| QCOM | Qualcomm | 70 / 4 | +66 |
| ASML | ASML Holding | 56 / 2 | +54 |
| META | Meta Platforms | 72 / 20 | +52 |
| INTC | Intel | 53 / 6 | +47 |
| 005930.KS | Samsung Electronics | 59 / 15 | +44 |
| GE | GE Aerospace | 44 / 0 | +44 |
| TSM | TSMC | 44 / 0 | +44 |
| CVX | Chevron | 45 / 2 | +43 |
| DELL | Dell Technologies | 45 / 4 | +41 |
One failed trial carries a third of healthcare's bearish reads, and regulation is again the only negative category
The worst reading of the week belonged to Novartis, 92 reads at 12 bullish to 75 bearish, after pelacarsen missed in Phase III. The stock fell about 14%, Deutsche Bank cut it to Hold, and Artisan Partners called for board changes. Amgen, at 10 bullish to 26 bearish, is not a second story: it competes in the same lipoprotein(a) class, and its week was that readout too. Across the window, 101 of Healthcare's 307 bearish reads (33%) carry that one trial. The sector still finished at plus 28%, which is the useful point about a heatmap built on counts: one large negative event moves a sector's tone without turning it, as long as the rest of the sector is being covered normally.
The rest of the bearish list is consumer and company-specific. Lululemon read 1 bullish to 28 bearish, Nike 1 to 19, American Eagle 11 to 23 and Kroger 7 to 18. Chewy read 10 to 28 on a free cash flow miss that a raised outlook did not offset, with downgrades from JPMorgan and Evercore and caution about pet spending. Netflix read 8 to 37, the second worst net of the week. Boston Scientific read 1 to 20 on the running cost of a cyberattack, a statement that it is unlikely to meet its 2026 sales and profit forecasts, and a spinal cord stimulator lead recall.
The category cut says the same thing the sector cut does. Regulation was the only negative news category of the week, minus 19% over 745 reads, against technology at plus 65% over 1,706 reads, mergers and acquisitions at plus 61% over 804 and earnings at plus 38% over 2,462. Inside regulation sit the Justice Department beef-price probe carried over from the prior week, the $455 million North Carolina PFAS settlement from Chemours, DuPont and Corteva (which is most of DuPont's minus 10), Ohio data-center tax breaks and the new $100,000 H-1B fee. As in the previous issue, the bearish engine of the week is the legal and regulatory docket rather than the tape.
One number deserves to be stated plainly rather than buried in methodology: this was the lightest window of the series. 9,859 reads across 7,949 articles is 11% below the prior week. Part of that is the calendar, since Monday September 7 was the US Labor Day holiday and produced 1,246 articles against 2,110 to 2,220 on each of Tuesday through Friday, which makes this a four-day news week. But reads have now declined six weeks in a row, from 13,963 to 9,859, a 29% drop, and that is larger than any single holiday explains. The percentages in this issue are directly comparable to earlier ones; the raw volumes are not, and we are looking at the trend separately.
| Ticker | Company | Bull / bear reads | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVS | Novartis | 12 / 75 | -63 |
| NFLX | Netflix | 8 / 37 | -29 |
| LULU | Lululemon Athletica | 1 / 28 | -27 |
| BSX | Boston Scientific | 1 / 20 | -19 |
| CHWY | Chewy | 10 / 28 | -18 |
| NKE | Nike | 1 / 19 | -18 |
| AMGN | Amgen | 10 / 26 | -16 |
| AEO | American Eagle Outfitters | 11 / 23 | -12 |
| SMR | NuScale Power | 3 / 14 | -11 |
| CTSH | Cognizant Technology Solutions | 1 / 12 | -11 |
| KR | Kroger | 7 / 18 | -11 |
| RYAAY | Ryanair | 2 / 13 | -11 |
Methodology
Covers every enriched news article published between September 7 and September 13, 2026 that AlphAI 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 9,442 reads from general news, 394 from SEC 8-K filings and 23 from SEC 6-K filings. For each article, AlphAI 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 largest multi-ticker article in this window is a premarket movers roundup that tags 20 tickers. 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. 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. Share classes and secondary venues are ranked separately and were checked for merges: Alphabet's two classes combine to net +33 (GOOGL +22, GOOG +11), which is below this week's leaderboard cut of +41, and no other name had a second class or venue above the 4-read floor, so no rows were combined. Two clusters on the boards are one event each and are described as such in the prose rather than counted as independent stories: ASML, Intel, Samsung Electronics and TSMC all move on High-NA EUV lithography, and Novartis and Amgen share the pelacarsen Phase III readout. One caveat on the totals: weekly article volume moves with both the news cycle and our collector coverage, and this window was the lightest of the series, 11% under the prior one and 29% under the level of six weeks ago, 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: AlphAI enriched news feed, GDELT Project (global news index), SEC EDGAR Form 8-K filings
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