Closing Bell 8/25/26

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**Scott Wapner** (0:42)
Guys, thanks so much. Welcome to Closing Bell. I'm Scott Wapner, live from Post9 here at the New York Stock Exchange. This make or break out begins with the countdown to NVIDIA. It's earnings 24 hours away now. So much riding on that report for that stock, for the AI trade, maybe the next leg of this bull market. We'll ask our experts what is really at stake coming up. In the meantime, here is the scorecard with 60 to go in regulation. We're green across the board. Tech is leading as that critical report does loom large elsewhere. AMD got an upgrade today. Those shares higher. Marvell popping ahead of its own earnings later this week. That's a nice move up 5% poor we've higher as well. So we're watching all sorts of tech names today. Wow, Dick's Sporting Goods, though. It's the worst day ever. Down 30%.
Its earnings report falling short. Guidance no good. Investors not liking that one bit.
We will have more on that as well in our show today. It does take us to our talk of the tape. All that lies ahead for your money this week. There's so much on our plates. For more, let's welcome in Lizanne Saunders, Schwab Center for Financial Research, Chief Investment Strategist. Welcome back.

**Lizanne Saunders** (1:44)
Thanks, Scott. Nice to be here.

**Scott Wapner** (1:46)
Are we just sort of in a holding pattern here? Before we get NVIDIA and then ultimately, we hear from Chair Worse at the end of the week.

**Lizanne Saunders** (1:56)
Yeah, but I think it's also consistent with the kind of churn and rotation that the market's been in for quite some time. I think rotation in and of itself is the new momentum trade. And I think increasingly there's a lot of money sort of playing those rotations, whether it's the institutional side, the commodity trading advisors, systematic funds, the long short hedge fund community playing off each other's positions. You get these really swift moves that sometimes might appear to just be churn waiting forward to your point, NVIDIA earnings, the Jackson Hole speech. But I think it's just part and parcel of the mechanics of the market these days.

**Scott Wapner** (2:31)
Do you think that this week is pivotal in how this market trades from here because of what lies ahead?

**Lizanne Saunders** (2:37)
Depends on what NVIDIA says. It depends on what Warsh says. You know, NVIDIA, for all the discussion about concentration within the market, there's actually become less concentration when you look at the influence of a cohort like the Magnificent 7 But where you do still see significant concentration is at the earnings level. So if you look at 2026, year over year estimated earnings for the S&P 500, and you look at the top 10 stocks providing those earnings, NVIDIA is number one, and it's 18% of overall S&P expected earnings growth in 2026 relative to 2025 You add Micron, which is another 14%, that gets you to 32%. That's a third of expected earnings growth this year coming from two stocks. So we may have alleviated some of the concentration problem as it relates to the weights within the indexes, but it's still there from an earnings standpoint, which is why it's such a pivotal report tomorrow.

**Scott Wapner** (3:33)
It doesn't usually trade that well on the back of earnings, but some are suggesting that this report has more to do with everything else than it does NVIDIA itself. I mean, we know the report is going to be good. We know the commentary from Jensen Wong is likely to be good, but there are hundreds of stocks, quite literally, that could move based on what they do and what he says, because they're all so tied in the ecosystem. That in and of itself is why this report looms so large.

**Lizanne Saunders** (4:02)
Right, and the ecosystem has gotten so much more diverse and broad, and it's why you're seeing plays down the cap spectrum into other sectors that, at least on the surface, might seem to only be peripheral beneficiaries. And I think that's been the name of the game in an environment where the monolithic decision of yes or no to the Mag-7 has given way to more connectivity between prices and fundamentals and a broader swath of opportunities, not just in the AI and AI-related space, but obviously in the energy space as well. I just think that there's a lot of money looking for different and shiny new objects than what was the case, say, last year.