Earnings Briefing · August 11, 2026 · AI Infrastructure

AI Infrastructure Demand Stays Red-Hot

CoreWeave pairs explosive backlog growth with heavy financing needs. Super Micro combines record demand with a sharp margin recovery.

CoreWeave: Exceptional demand, expensive expansion

Q2 revenue more than doubled YoY and edged past consensus. Adjusted net loss of $567M was narrower than the $677M analysts expected.

Backlog climbed 246% to $104B, with more than $25B of new commitments added early in Q3. CoreWeave also became the first cloud provider to test Nvidia's Vera Rubin NVL72 platform.

Capacity comes at a steep price: quarterly capex reached $9.4B, contracted power rose to about 3.7 GW, and the company has raised more than $10B through unsecured debt and convertible bonds.

Super Micro: Margin recovery strengthens the story

Fiscal Q4 revenue nearly doubled YoY to $11.1B. Non-GAAP gross margin reached 17.6% — an encouraging improvement alongside rapid revenue growth.

Management forecast $65B–$72B FY27 revenue, supported by record backlog and more than $60B of new orders received during the quarter.

Q1 revenue guidance of $14.5B–$15.5B points to continued strength across AI servers and data-center infrastructure.

Market reactions reflect after-hours trading and may change. For informational purposes only.

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Maria's Market Note · Trader Health · Special Edition

Do You Have SMWG? — Stock Market Weight Gain

The market may be moving all day. The trader may not be. Long hours, boredom and mindless snacking can quietly add up.

10:47 A.M. — No setup. No trade. One hand is on the mouse. The other is in the snack bag.

Boredom has a calorie count

When the charts stop moving, food becomes entertainment. The trader is not always hungry — just bored, restless or waiting for another five-minute candle.

Because attention stays on the screen, the calories barely register. A handful becomes half the bag. One cookie becomes four. A coffee becomes dessert with a lid. The trade may never trigger. The appetite already did.

Remote trading changes the equation

Remote trading removes the small movements built into a normal workday. No commute. No walk between meetings. Sometimes no real lunch break. The desk becomes the office, restaurant and command center.

Six hours pass. The market travels hundreds of points. The trader travels six feet.

Every emotion can become an excuse to eat

A loss creates stress, so we eat for comfort. A win creates excitement, so we eat as a reward. A missed rally creates frustration, so we eat while replaying the trade we should have taken.

Add energy drinks, delivery meals and late-night charts. Sleep suffers. Energy drops. Exercise disappears. Then the cycle resets before the next opening bell.

Put health rules in the trading plan

Trading has entry rules, exit rules and risk rules. Health needs rules too.

Market Intelligence · CPI Watch

CPI Tomorrow: The Fed Is Split — The Market Is Waiting

Inflation is improving, but it isn't dead. Wednesday's CPI could give policymakers more room to ease — or another reason to stay cautious.

Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack has remained focused on inflation risk, arguing that price pressures are still too high and policy shouldn't turn easy too quickly.

Markets are now watching Wednesday's 8:30 AM ET CPI report for another clue about where rates may go next.

Why This One Matters

Tomorrow's CPI is about one thing: is inflation cooling enough to give the Fed room to ease, or is it still too sticky to declare victory?

A softer reading could help bring Treasury yields down, improve the outlook for rate cuts and give stocks some breathing room.

A hotter reading could do the opposite — keep yields elevated, push rate-cut expectations further out and put pressure back on growth stocks.

The 10-year Treasury yield was near 4.69%, still high enough to matter for stock valuations and borrowing costs. At the same time, small-business sentiment rose to an 11-month high — businesses becoming a little more optimistic even while inflation remains a concern.

Market Intelligence · Active vs. Passive

Is "Set It and Forget It" Investing Getting Too Big?

Michael Green, Senior Executive Advisor at Tier 1 Alpha, is challenging the old idea that investors should simply buy the index and never look under the hood.

The Simple Advice

For years, investors have been told the simplest strategy may be the best: buy an S&P 500 index fund, keep adding money and leave it alone. The argument challenges that thinking — not because passive investing hasn't worked, but because it has become an enormous force in the market.

When the Money Moves Automatically

Market-cap-weighted index funds don't stop and ask whether NVIDIA, Apple or another company looks expensive. When new money enters the fund, it is allocated according to the index — and the biggest companies generally receive the biggest share.

Are stock prices being driven only by earnings and fundamentals — or increasingly by the sheer flow of money into the market?

Active investors can help keep prices connected to fundamentals by buying undervalued stocks and selling expensive ones. The model assumes that this stabilizing force weakens as passive ownership grows. In the 2026 paper, the model suggests index volatility could begin rising sharply when passive ownership reaches roughly 65%. At about 90%, it projects much faster increases in volatility and more extreme boom-and-bust cycles.

Why Passive Still Works

Passive investing remains low-cost, diversified and notoriously difficult for active managers to beat consistently. Broad index funds also reduce dependence on any single company or manager while making it easier to invest consistently over time.

Those benefits do not erase concerns about market structure; they explain why the debate is about understanding the trade-offs, not declaring passive investing good or bad.

What the Argument Really Says

The market is not simply earnings, P/E ratios and company fundamentals anymore. ETF flows, algorithms, options positioning, liquidity, bot trading and enormous amounts of money moving automatically now matter too. Passive investing may still be a perfectly good long-term strategy — but the larger it becomes, the more important it is to understand how those automatic flows can affect the stocks and indexes traders are watching every day.

The Week Ahead

Earnings Calendar · Aug 10–14

The names still worth putting on your radar this week.

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Still ahead this week: AMAT + NU + COHR Wed 8/13 AMC.

Week of August 10 — Two SPX 0DTE trades

Two SPX 0DTE plays — same 225 M 95 50 00 strategy, morning and afternoon.

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