At a glance: No S&P 500 names report today, closing out a retail-heavy week — Walmart and Deere were Thursday's marquee premarket prints, on a split tape. The calendar reopens Tuesday with the year's most consequential AI-earnings stretch, led by Nvidia, Salesforce and CrowdStrike.

Scorecard — reported since we last wrote

Walmart and Deere, Thursday's premarket prints, sent opposite messages on the tape. Walmart beat cleanly on both lines — EPS of $0.81 against a $0.74 consensus (a 9.3% surprise) and revenue of $187.94B (+0.6%) — with EPS up 22.7% vs prev.Q.'s $0.66, yet the stock fell 9.2% in the regular session, a reaction running directly against the surprise. The market focused on the composition of the beat rather than its size: comp-sales growth that lagged expectations and questions over how much of the operating-income gain leaned on tariff-refund benefits versus core margin expansion. Deere told the opposite story: EPS of $5.10 beat by 8.6% even as it fell 22.1% vs prev.Q.'s $6.55 — fiscal Q2 is the seasonal peak for large-ag equipment sales, so the sequential drop is a calendar effect, not a demand signal — and revenue's $11.00B beat by 2.5%. The stock rose 6.9%, as construction-and-forestry strength offset continued large-ag softness and management's framing of this quarter as the cycle bottom for farm equipment was rewarded even as the ag segment itself stayed a drag.

The week ahead

Next week reopens with the most consequential AI-earnings stretch of the quarter. Intuit leads off Tuesday after the close, its TurboTax and small-business platform still digesting this year's workforce restructuring, with margin trajectory alongside the top line the swing factor; Williams-Sonoma reports the same morning as the housing-adjacent read on discretionary spend. Wednesday is the heaviest day by far: Nvidia's after-close print is the single most-watched data point for the AI trade this quarter, with data-center demand durability, the pace of gross-margin recovery from this year's China-export-related charge, and hyperscaler-capex commentary the focus against a valuation that leaves little room for anything short of a clean beat-and-raise. CrowdStrike reports the same evening carrying one of the market's richest multiples, where net-new-ARR momentum rather than the EPS line looks set to decide the stock's reaction, alongside Salesforce — where Agentforce and Data Cloud traction are being watched to offset continued softness in marketing/commerce and Tableau — plus Synopsys, Agilent, Veeva, HP and Smucker's. Thursday brings a software-and-retail cluster: Marvell's custom-silicon and AI-interconnect growth carries read-across for the broader custom-ASIC theme, Workday and Autodesk test enterprise-software demand, and Dollar General, Ulta, Best Buy and Hormel close out the week on the consumer side. On the macro side, July PCE inflation data lands mid-week as the last significant inflation print before the Fed's next policy decision, and is likely to color how the market reads any of the week's guidance commentary on pricing and consumer resilience.

Informational only — not investment advice. Figures are consensus/estimates and option-implied values from public sources and may be revised.