Wednesday Premarket Edition — August 12, 2026

Indices, Rates, Commodities

n/i no futures contract exists on the Nasdaq Composite · closed Asian session already completed before 08:00 ET

Index rows show the cash close against the corresponding front-month future; the percentage is measured against the future's own prior settle (ES 7,747.50 · NQ 29,626.00 · YM 53,880.00 · RTY 3,035.50). Rates are shown as the 10-year note future because the CBOE yield index prints no extended-hours bar — the note is up, meaning yields easing into the print. The Nikkei's prior close is Monday's, since Tokyo was shut Tuesday for Mountain Day.

Ticker Board — 08:00:00 ET

Fifteen of eighteen names higher, and the leadership is concentrated in AI infrastructure — CRWV, SMCI and MU take the top three places. SPCX has reclaimed the $135 IPO level after Tuesday's 3.93% drop. Only PLTR is meaningfully lower; AAPL is flat at −0.10% and MSFT is the sole megacap with a visible decline.

The platform names that sold off Tuesday have stabilised: GOOGL +0.52%, AMZN +0.35%, META +0.15%. Only MSFT has continued lower.

Pre-Market Movers

CRWV — up 18.4%. Revenue of $2.575B beat consensus by only $20M, roughly 0.8% — not enough on its own to move a stock this far. The surprise sat lower down: adjusted operating income of $128M against company guidance of $30–90M, more than double the midpoint. Adjusted loss of $1.03 a share against $1.20 expected. Backlog reached $104B, excluding over $25B of new commitments already added in Q3, with business announced from Anthropic and Meta during the quarter.

The capex line cuts the other way. 2026 guidance rose to $35–39B from $31–35B while full-year revenue guidance rose only $300M at the midpoint — roughly $13 of additional capex for every $1 of additional 2026 revenue. At the new midpoint, capex of about $37B would be near 2.9x projected revenue of $12.8B. Quarterly net loss widened to $626M from $290M, with Q3 interest expense guided to $860–940M. The market bought the margin beat, not the spending.

SMCI — up 8.7%. Much of the headline was already known: a 21 July preliminary update had flagged revenue near the low end of guidance and gross margin of 15–17%, and the stock rose sharply on that release. Wednesday's move reflects the final figures landing above even that revised range, plus first FY2027 guidance. Q4 net sales of $11.1B came in near the low end of the $11–12.5B range, as customer-side delays in power, cooling and networking pushed shipments into later quarters. The margin was the story: GAAP gross margin of 17.5% against guidance of 8.2–8.4%, up from 9.9% in Q3, on a richer enterprise mix. Non-GAAP EPS of $1.70 against an expected $0.65–0.79. Fiscal 2027 revenue guided to $65–72B, Q1 to $14.5–15.5B — but with gross margin guided back down to 10.4–10.8%, so the 17.5% is not presented by management as the new run rate.

Two offsets worth carrying: full-year operating cash flow was negative $6.8B as inventory and capacity scaled, and the board is conducting an independent review of certain transactions related to export-control issues. Results remain preliminary and unaudited.

MU — up 2.9%, with SanDisk and SK Hynix also bid after reports that Singapore's Temasek plans to invest directly in Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix.

PLTR — down 1.7%, the weakest name on the board for a second session.

Not on the board: Nebius (NBIS) was up around 14% ahead of its own report before the open. Nvidia holds close to a 10% stake, so the print has read-through.

Today's Catalyst

July CPI, 8:30 AM ET. Consensus: headline +0.1% m/m after a 0.4% decline in June, annual rate easing to 3.4% from 3.5%. Core +0.2% m/m, roughly 2.5% y/y. PPI Thursday, retail sales Friday.

September odds sit near 50/50 on CME FedWatch. The 29 July hold was a 9–3 vote with three officials dissenting in favour of a hike, which is why this print carries unusual weight — it is the first major inflation reading since that decision.

Geopolitics & Macro

United States. The U.S.–Iran deadlock persists. Tehran maintains Hormuz will not normalise until sanctions and asset freezes are lifted; Trump has rejected the reparations framing and demanded compensation of his own. Six people aboard a vessel in the Red Sea were killed by Houthi rebels — the first reported fatalities from attacks on Red Sea shipping in more than a year. U.S. forces fired missiles at a container ship that allegedly attempted to breach the blockade of Iranian ports in the Gulf of Oman.

Rates. July payrolls fell 23,000, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and the unemployment rate eased to 4.1% from 4.2% — but the labour force shrank by 264,000 and participation fell to 61.4%, the lowest in over five years. May and June were revised down by a combined 103,000. The fed funds target remains 3.50–3.75%.

United Kingdom. The Bank of England held Bank Rate at 3.75% on 30 July in a 6–3 vote, its fifth hold this year.

Japan. Tokyo reopened Wednesday after Mountain Day, closing 0.83% higher at 67,524.06 — a fresh high above Monday's 66,970.22, which had itself been the strongest close since 15 July.

Poland. WIG20 closed Tuesday at a record 4,048.66, its second consecutive record, and was firmer again at 4,061.57 by 8:00 ET Wednesday. Banks benefit from elevated rates; Orlen tracks the crude complex.

Outlook

Futures point to a higher open led by the Nasdaq, with bonds bid alongside equities — an unusual combination that reads as positioning for a soft print rather than broad risk appetite. The session's shape is set by CPI: a cool reading validates both moves, a hot one reopens the September debate that three FOMC dissenters have already forced into view. Crude near $89 on an unresolved Hormuz impasse keeps a floor under inflation expectations regardless of today's number.

It is tempting to read the CoreWeave move as the market rewarding capex after punishing Alphabet for it on Tuesday. The detail does not support that. CoreWeave's revenue beat was 0.8%; what moved the stock was an operating-income beat of more than double the guidance midpoint, and the capex increase implies roughly $13 of spending for every $1 of incremental 2026 revenue. Both sessions are better read the same way: the market is paying for demonstrated operating leverage and discounting capex regardless of who spends it. Alphabet raised capex while free cash flow turned negative and offered no offsetting margin surprise, and carried regulatory overhang besides. CoreWeave and Super Micro raised or sustained heavy spending but each delivered a margin figure well above their own guidance. The variable is not who spends — it is whether the spending arrives with evidence of returns.

For readers running systematic exposure into event risk of this kind, our notes on risk management in futures and what quantitative models can and cannot price are the relevant background. Prior editions are collected in the news archive, and longer-form pieces in the article library.

Notes on the Data

This edition carries the same instrument set as the Tuesday premarket edition — the same eighteen snapshot rows and the same eighteen tickers — so the two are directly comparable line by line. Tuesday's board was led by RIOT and ASTS on deal news; Wednesday's is led by CRWV, SMCI and MU on earnings, with the platform names that fell Tuesday now stabilising rather than extending lower.

CPI is carried as due-with-consensus, not as a result. The release lands 30 minutes after this cutoff and is outside the edition.

Two bar conventions, stated openly. Asian closes are taken from daily bars, which carry the official settlement — Tokyo at 67,524.06 rather than the last intraday print of 67,547.81, Shanghai at 3,946.68 rather than 3,948.49. Everything still trading at 08:00 ET is taken from the 08:00:00 minute bar. Both are precise; mixing them silently would not be, so the distinction is noted here.

European figures are intraday. London and Frankfurt were mid-session at 08:00 ET. DAX 26,485.25 and FTSE 10,841.06 are that moment, not the day's close — both had drifted lower by their own closes.

Bitcoin caveat. Crypto trades continuously, so "prior close" is an arbitrary cut-off that differs by vendor. The 63,547.05 above is Yahoo's; The Motley Fool records Tuesday's close as 63,669.00. Neither is wrong — the column is inherently soft for this asset.

Data boundary: 08:00:00 ET, Wednesday 12 August 2026. The CPI release and everything after the 9:30 ET open are outside this edition.

Information Sources

Primary price feed. All index, futures, commodity and ticker figures are 08:00:00 ET one-minute bars from Yahoo Finance extended-hours data, pulled in a single pass — one venue, one timestamp, no blending across publishers. Prior closes are the matching prior-session settles from the same feed.

Cross-verification. Bloomberg reported S&P futures +0.3% and Nasdaq futures +0.7% at 8:05 AM ET, matching the 8:00 bars above; Barchart put NQU26 at +0.71% on the same catalyst. MarketScreener put CoreWeave at +18.2% and Super Micro at +9.2% — both within a normal pre-market drift of the 8:00 bars, since those quotes carry their own timestamps. Tuesday's closes were verified against The Motley Fool, which agreed to the cent on every overlapping name.

Note on oil quotes. TheStreet reported Brent at $89.24 and WTI at $83.70 this morning, within cents of the 8:00 bars. Brent quotes near $90 circulating this morning reflect either a later sample or a different contract month.

Earnings detail. CoreWeave Q2 figures, backlog and guidance: CNBC; operating-income beat and capex-per-revenue arithmetic: INDmoney; Q3 guidance and exit-ARR detail from the earnings call: Yahoo Finance / GuruFocus. Super Micro results are taken from the company's own Form 8-K filed with the SEC; FY2027 margin guidance, negative operating cash flow and the export-control review: BigGo Finance, 24/7 Wall St. Pre-market context: Invezz, Benzinga. Temasek report and Nebius: Stocktwits via Yahoo Finance. Red Sea fatalities and the Gulf of Oman action: TheStreet, citing CBS News. CPI consensus: Invezz. Payrolls and participation: BLS. FOMC vote: Federal Reserve. Bank Rate: Bank of England.

*Not investment advice.*