10 Stocks Worth Watching This Week: A Hawkish Fed, $90 Oil, and the Jobs Test — August 31–September 4, 2026

Last week gave investors both halves of the 2026 market in five sessions. Through Thursday, it was the bull case on full display: Nvidia beat expectations and jumped nearly 9%, Salesforce and CrowdStrike reignited software, hopes of a US-Iran de-escalation put a bid under everything, and the Dow printed a fresh record as the S&P 500 clocked its best weekly stretch since 2023. Then Friday happened. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh used his Jackson Hole platform to reaffirm the inflation fight in unambiguous terms — keeping the possibility of a rate hike, not a cut, alive in market pricing — while the US-Iran situation swung back toward escalation and pushed crude through $90. Stocks gave back a chunk of the week's gains into the close, and Bitcoin slipped below $80,000.

That tension — AI-driven earnings strength versus a Fed that refuses to declare victory and a live geopolitical premium in oil — is the entire setup for this week.

The calendar is dense. August nonfarm payrolls land Friday, and with Warsh explicitly tying policy to the data, it is the single most important print of the week: a hot number validates the hike-risk repricing; a soft one walks it back. Before that, we get JOLTS job openings, ISM manufacturing, the Fed's Beige Book, and a Bank of Canada rate decision, with G20 ministers gathering in the background. On the earnings side, the week is chips, cybersecurity, and consumer: Dell reports Tuesday, with Broadcom and Lululemon expected Thursday and Palo Alto Networks also on the slate. And in the background, the largest private-market story in years went public in more ways than one: SpaceX filed for its IPO, disclosing a $1.2 billion quarterly profit at Starlink and 10.3 million subscribers — a filing that resets how the market values the entire space economy.

Here are the first three names, free. The remaining seven — including the full earnings-week playbook — are for paid members below.

1. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) — ~$466 | Long-Term Conviction

Thesis: AMD has broken out to all-time highs on a narrative shift the market is only beginning to price: the x86 CPU renaissance. Server CPU share gains against Intel continue quarter after quarter, while the MI-series accelerator line has established AMD as the credible second source in AI compute — the position every hyperscaler wants to fund for negotiating leverage alone. The company is no longer a cyclical catch-up trade; it is structural infrastructure for the AI buildout with a CPU franchise throwing off cash underneath it.

This week's catalyst: Broadcom's Thursday report is the sector's referendum on AI capex durability — a strong print and guide lifts the entire complex, and AMD is the highest-beta quality name in it. ISM manufacturing Tuesday also gives a read on the broader semis demand backdrop.

Key risk: The stock is at all-time highs in a week where the Fed chair is talking about hikes — richly valued momentum names take the first and hardest hit in any rate-driven de-risking. A soft Broadcom guide would compound it.

Timeframe: Long-term; expect volatility this week.

2. Rocket Lab (RKLB) — ~$64 | Long-Term Conviction

Thesis: The SpaceX IPO filing is the most important thing to happen to Rocket Lab's stock that has nothing to do with Rocket Lab. Starlink's disclosed $1.2 billion quarterly profit and 10.3 million subscribers hands public-market investors the first hard proof that space is a profitable business at scale, not a story sector — and it forces institutional money to build space-economy allocations. Rocket Lab is the only diversified, vertically integrated pure-play merchant alternative in the public markets: launch cadence compounding, a space-systems segment that already generates the majority of revenue, and Neutron as the medium-lift option every non-SpaceX customer wants to exist.

This week's catalyst: SpaceX IPO coverage runs all week as banks and media digest the filing — every comparison table puts RKLB in the conversation, and re-rating flows tend to hit the liquid pure-play first.

Key risk: The same filing cuts both ways: when SpaceX lists, it becomes the sector's default institutional allocation and could pull capital out of the proxies. Execution risk on Neutron's ramp remains the fundamental swing factor.

Timeframe: Long-term.

3. RTX Corporation (RTX) — ~$212 | Long-Term Conviction

Thesis: The US-Iran escalation that drove oil through $90 on Friday is the sharp end of a structural story: air defense is the scarcest commodity in modern warfare, and RTX makes the systems — Patriot batteries, interceptors, and the munitions lines that NATO, Gulf states, and Indo-Pacific allies are all queuing for simultaneously. The backlog is at record levels, replenishment cycles run years beyond any single conflict, and European rearmament budgets are now legislated, not proposed. This is defense demand with multi-year visibility regardless of how any one crisis resolves.

This week's catalyst: Every headline out of the US-Iran theater reprices the defense complex in real time. G20 ministerial meetings this week add a diplomatic track worth monitoring — and any Gulf-state procurement announcements tied to the escalation would land directly in RTX's order book.

Key risk: A genuine de-escalation or brokered deal — exactly what markets rallied on early last week — takes the geopolitical premium out fast. RTX held near highs through the peace-hope rally, but the froth in the trade is real.

Timeframe: Long-term.

The rest of this briefing is for paid members: the four earnings setups with entry and exit logic (Broadcom, Dell, Palo Alto Networks, Lululemon), the energy name we want on any US-Iran headline, the memory-supercycle stock that has gone parabolic and how we'd handle it here, the bank positioned for a hawkish-Fed week — and the bottom-line positioning framework for jobs Friday.

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