Sentiment Heatmap — Week of September 28, 2026
AlphAI classified 14,903 ticker level sentiment reads across 12,458 news articles the week of September 28, 2026. Net tone came in at 30.3% bullish, down from 35.2% the week before and close to the 30.1% of the week of September 14. Tuesday through Thursday ran between plus 34.6 and plus 38.2. Monday at plus 18.6 and Friday at plus 20.2 pulled the week down, each on a handful of company events. All twelve sectors finished positive for a fourth straight week, led by Energy.
News tone in the week of September 28 ran net 30.3% bullish across 14,903 scored ticker reads, down from 35.2% a week earlier. The drop came from two days, Monday and Friday, and on Friday Nike's earnings alone produced 126 bearish reads. Nvidia led the bullish board on a record $150 billion buyback.
Nvidia's buyback led a bullish board built on results, contracts and deals
Nvidia was the most covered name of the week and the most bullish, at 329 bullish to 47 bearish across 416 reads from 207 distinct domains. Its board approved a record $150 billion buyback, and the stock broke to an all time high of $237.87 on the buyback, an analyst upgrade and AI demand. Micron was second at 211 to 47 on record quarterly results and reports that orders will keep memory chips short through 2028, although several pieces noted that the stock fell after the report. Accenture read 160 bullish to 7 bearish on results that raised hopes for a recovery in IT services spending.
Four rows on this board are linked to another name and should be read as one story each. Boeing, at 236 to 100, won the Navy's F/A-XX strike fighter program, worth more than $20 billion. Northrop Grumman lost the same competition and read 6 bullish to 24 bearish. Most of Boeing's bearish reads came on Monday, 56 of its 70 reads that day, after the FAA delayed approval of the 737 Max 10 over a software issue. Hewlett Packard Enterprise read 97 to 2 on a $1.2 billion order from Vultr for the first AMD Helios AI rack systems, which also sits inside AMD's plus 136. AMD's own week was split: its $8.2 billion all stock acquisition of World Labs drew both bullish reads and dilution concerns. AstraZeneca at plus 74 and Summit Therapeutics at plus 59, below the board, are the same transaction, a $2 billion AstraZeneca investment in a cancer partnership with Summit. RTX at 73 to 1 took a $511.5 million Navy contract modification for SPY-6 radar hardware and an AMRAAM deal reported at $20.7 billion.
Eli Lilly read 147 to 12 on detailed Phase 3 ACHIEVE-4 results for Foundayo, which showed cardiovascular safety against insulin, with CNBC calling the obesity data mixed. Bitcoin read 190 to 56 after the SEC approved 3x leveraged Bitcoin and Ether exchange traded products, with the price climbing toward $87,000. The bearish side was the $387 million Bitget hack. Synopsys scored 112 bullish and no bearish reads on a $1 billion AI chip design agreement with Amazon and a deal with OpenAI, which sent the shares up 10%. Tesla read 161 to 64: third quarter deliveries beat estimates, while $30 billion of new credit agreements drew bearish reads.
Energy led the sectors at plus 48 over 564 reads, carried by TotalEnergies at plus 51 and Shell at plus 40. Healthcare followed at plus 43 and Cryptocurrency at plus 42. Technology was the largest sector by far, with 27.5% of all reads, and finished at plus 37.
| Ticker | Company | Bull / bear reads | Net |
|---|---|---|---|
| NVDA | NVIDIA | 329 / 47 | +282 |
| MU | Micron Technology | 211 / 47 | +164 |
| ACN | Accenture | 160 / 7 | +153 |
| BA | Boeing | 236 / 100 | +136 |
| AMD | Advanced Micro Devices | 170 / 34 | +136 |
| LLY | Eli Lilly | 147 / 12 | +135 |
| BTC-USD | Bitcoin | 190 / 56 | +134 |
| SNPS | Synopsys | 112 / 0 | +112 |
| TSLA | Tesla | 161 / 64 | +97 |
| HPE | Hewlett Packard Enterprise | 97 / 2 | +95 |
| AZN | AstraZeneca | 79 / 5 | +74 |
| RTX | RTX | 73 / 1 | +72 |
Nike alone carried the bearish board, and Monday was a separate set of company events
Nike was the most bearish name of the week at 12 bullish to 186 bearish, across 216 reads from 73 distinct domains. The company reported declines in first quarter profit and revenue, with a weaker sales outlook and layoffs expected, and the stock fell between 5% and 10% depending on the report. Almost all of it landed in two days: 45 of 60 reads were bearish on Thursday October 1 and 126 of 135 on Friday October 2. For comparison, the most bearish name in the previous issue, Oracle, was at minus 84. Without Nike the week would read 31.9% bullish instead of 30.3%, so one company moved the weekly number by 1.6 points.
Monday was the weakest day at plus 18.6, and it was not Nike's doing. MongoDB read 57 bearish of 66 reads that day after its chief executive, CJ Desai, left after ten months to build an enterprise AI unit at Meta. Boeing's 737 Max 10 delay accounted for 56 bearish reads of 70, and Apple took 40 bearish of 47 after a jury ordered it to pay $5.7 billion in a haptics patent case. Friday, at plus 20.2, combined Nike with Western Digital and Seagate, each 29 bearish of 30 reads, after Toshiba announced a $380 million expansion of its hard drive business. The two storage names have one driver and sit next to each other on the board. Excluding Nike, Corteva and Fair Isaac, Monday still reads plus 19.3 and Friday plus 26.6.
Corteva needs a caveat. It read 13 bullish to 52 bearish, mostly on headlines that it sank 83% after completing the spin-off of its seed business as Vylor. That figure is the share price adjusting for the distribution of Vylor shares to Corteva holders, not a loss of that much value, but the coverage framed it as a collapse and the scores follow the coverage. We count the reads as scored. Fair Isaac read 5 to 52 after the FHFA moved mortgage pricing to a single grid, ending the FICO score's monopoly there. The stock fell 27%, its worst day since 1989. Starbucks, at 0 to 32, is on the bearish board for a second week on the closure of about 250 North American stores. Lyft read 2 to 31 on a $272.5 million settlement with California drivers over misclassification, Liquidia 0 to 26 after a patent loss to United Therapeutics over Yutrepia sent the stock down 57%, and Gold Fields 11 to 34 after Northern Star rejected its takeover approach.
Consumer Defensive at plus 1 and Basic Materials at plus 3 were effectively flat rather than positive. Basic Materials carries Corteva at minus 39 and Gold Fields at minus 23 against Rio Tinto at plus 26, and Consumer Defensive carries Cal-Maine Foods at minus 22 and PepsiCo at minus 19. Regulation was the one large news category with a negative tone, at minus 23.1% over 1,418 reads (geopolitics was more negative, but on only 10 reads). Technology news ran at plus 63.3% over 1,906 reads and mergers and acquisitions at plus 47.5% over 1,691.
Methodology
Covers every enriched news article published between September 28 and October 4, 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 14,143 reads from general news, 727 from SEC 8-K filings and 33 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 every ticker it tags; the largest multi-ticker article in this window is a market movers list that tags 18 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 99.3% 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, with ties broken by the larger number of reads: Boeing ranks above AMD at plus 136, Seagate above Starbucks at minus 32 and Moderna above Gold Fields at minus 23. The next names below the boards are Carnival at plus 66 and Cal-Maine Foods at minus 22. Share classes and secondary securities are ranked separately, and this week none changes a rank. Boeing's, Hewlett Packard Enterprise's and Gold Fields' second lines carry no reads, Alphabet's two classes combine to plus 32 and Strategy's common and STRC preferred to plus 26, both below the bullish board. Four pairs are linked and described as such in the prose rather than counted as independent stories: Boeing and Northrop Grumman (the F/A-XX award), AstraZeneca and Summit Therapeutics (one $2 billion deal), Western Digital and Seagate (Toshiba's expansion) and AMD and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (the Helios order). Volume rose for a reason unrelated to the news. AlphAI added direct publisher feeds on September 29, and the window holds 50,557 enriched articles against 34,202 to 38,319 in each of the five weeks before it, while scored reads rose 33.5% from 11,166 the week before. Compare percentages across issues, and treat raw volumes as a separate series. The week of September 21, recounted today, still stands at 11,166 reads and 35.2% net bullish, as published. 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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