Nasdaq Up in Pre-Market on Strength from NVDA, CRM & More

Thursday, August 27th, 2026

Pre-market futures are mixed this morning — down -110 points on the blue-chip Dow, but +240 points on the tech heavy Nasdaq, with the S&P 500 splitting the difference, +22 points. This follows a Wednesday afternoon chock-full of earnings beats in the tech sector: +18% on Okta OKTA, +10% for Salesforce CRM and +9% for cybersecurity staple CrowdStrike CRWD.

NVIDIA NVDA also posted Q2 earnings after the close yesterday, as you may know. The company continues to outperform even extraordinary estimates, with record revenues posted yet again. Guidance for the current quarter exceeds $100 billion for the first time ever: +$108 billion, +/- 2%. Shares of the supreme AI play are up another +6.5% in today’s early trading, adding to its +12.4% gains year to date.
 

Jobless Claims Remain at Multi-Decade Lows

This being a “normal” Thursday, we see new Weekly Jobless Claims, and the narrative stays extremely complimentary to overall labor market news: 203K on Initial Claims is 5K fewer than projected, and keeping near 60-year lows that we have seen for much of the summer.

Continuing Claims also tacked down from the prior week — 1.78 million versus a downwardly revised 1.796 million in the last report. We’ve remained mostly under an historically low 1.8 million level since mid-April; in terms of overall numbers reflecting our current labor force, none look as healthy as jobless claims have for much of 2026.
 

Trade Balance & Inventories Go Wide of Expectations

Advance Trade Balance in Goods for July swung more deeply into the negative than expected: -$118.8 billion is the deepest deficit we’ve seen since the record low -$135 billion recorded back in March 2025, directly ahead of the “Liberation Day” launch of the new tariff war. Exports were relatively in-line with expectations at $199.4 billion, but Imports came in a much more expensive $318.2 billion, increasing $11.4 billion in one month.

Also for July, Wholesale Inventories racked up their sixth straight up-month, jumping +100 basis points (bps) month over month to +1.3%. Year over year, wholesale inventories are up +5.7%. Retail Inventories jumped half a percentage point from expectations to +0.7%, following a downwardly revised -0.2% the previous month. Inventories count as overall productivity, but generally seen as the weakest form of growth, as unsold products tend to stay on the shelves. 

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