Top 10 Stocks to Watch — Tuesday, August 4: The AI Capex Trade Gets Audited

For eighteen months the AI infrastructure trade has been an argument about the future. This morning it is an argument about the past quarter, and the past quarter is winning.

Caterpillar reported before the bell and printed the first $20 billion revenue quarter in its 101-year history, with the Power and Energy segment (large reciprocating engines and turbines, which is the polite way of saying data center backup and prime power) up 17% and segment profit up 30%. Ameresco, a $500 million-a-quarter energy services company almost nobody outside the sector follows, booked $1.8 billion in new awards and said $1.2 billion of it was data center power infrastructure. Backblaze signed the largest contract in its corporate life, $335 million with CoreWeave. Palantir beat on both lines and raised. Every one of those companies sells a different thing. Every one of them got paid by the same customer.

That is the frame for today. Monday was already strong: the Dow closed up 1.32% at 53,178.41, the S&P 500 up 1.48% at 7,600.50, the Nasdaq Composite up 2.13% at 25,913.90 and the Russell 2000 up 1.73% at 2,981.91, helped by a 10-year Treasury yield that has backed off to 4.69% from the one-year highs it set to close last week. Futures are adding modestly to it, with Dow futures up about 0.2%, S&P 500 futures up 0.2% and Nasdaq 100 futures up 0.3%. WTI is firmer near $82.12, up 2.22%, and gold is flat around $4,053.

The calendar is light on macro and heavy on consequence. June trade balance lands at 8:30 a.m. ET (consensus near a $76.5 billion deficit against $77.59 billion prior), June JOLTS job openings and factory orders at 10:00 a.m., and Kansas City Fed President Jeff Schmid speaks in the evening. The real events are after the close, when SpaceX files its first quarterly report as a public company and AMD reports into a tape that has just been told, four separate times before breakfast, that AI demand is real. ISM Services follows Wednesday and payrolls close the week Friday.

All prices below are pre-market prints timestamped approximately 7:06 a.m. ET, with Monday's regular-session close for reference. These are watch candidates and scenarios, not recommendations. Pre-market tape is thin and gaps fill more often than they hold.

1. $SPCX, SpaceX

$116.98 pre-market, up 2.14%. Monday close $114.53, up 5.68%.

The single most consequential print of the quarter, and the market has almost no history to price it against. SpaceX reports its first results as a public company after the close today, with the call at 4:30 p.m. ET. FactSet consensus is roughly $6.88 billion in Q2 revenue against a loss of $0.23 per share. The segment that matters is connectivity: the Street is looking for about $3.82 billion from Starlink and roughly $1.42 billion in segment operating profit, up from $1.19 billion in Q1, with growth accelerating from 31.6% to about 52.6% on international expansion. Starlink ended March with 10.3 million subscribers across 164 countries, more than double a year earlier.

The stock is not going into this from a position of strength. It IPO'd June 12 at $135, opened at $150, peaked at $225.64 on June 16 and has spent the last six weeks giving back roughly half of that. Two days after tonight's print, on Thursday August 6, the first lock-up tranche begins releasing what could ultimately reach 911.5 million shares, a number larger than the entire current public float.

Watch for: Starlink's operating profit line rather than the consolidated loss. A company trading near 49 times expected revenue is being valued on one segment's trajectory, and Thursday's unlock means any disappointment gets met with supply rather than dip buyers.

2. $CAT, Caterpillar

$903.00 pre-market, up 8.79%. Monday close $830.03.

Caterpillar reported at 6:30 a.m. ET and the print was not close. Sales and revenues of $20.5 billion, up 24% year over year and the first time the company has cleared $20 billion in a quarter. GAAP profit of $7.77 per share against $4.62 a year ago, adjusted profit of $8.17 against a consensus near $6.25. Adjusted operating margin of 21.9% versus 17.6%. Construction Industries sales rose 35% to $8.3 billion with segment profit up 57%. Power and Energy rose 17% to $8.2 billion with profit up 30%, driven explicitly by data center demand for large reciprocating engines and turbines.

This is the industrial confirmation of the AI buildout, and it is arriving in cash rather than in backlog language. Management flagged strong order rates and a growing backlog across all three primary segments off a base that was already a record $63 billion entering the quarter.

Watch for: whether the gap holds through the 10:00 a.m. window. An 8.8% pre-market move on a $390 billion industrial is a repricing, not a pop, and those either consolidate above the gap or fill it within two sessions. The 52-week high of $1,073.46 is still about 19% above this morning's quote, which is unusual context for a company printing records.

3. $AMD, Advanced Micro Devices

$508.95 pre-market, up 5.02%. Monday close $484.64, up 1.78%.

AMD reports after the close with the call at 5:00 p.m. ET. Management guided Q2 revenue to approximately $11.2 billion plus or minus $300 million; consensus has settled near $11.3 billion on adjusted EPS of $1.61, implying roughly 46% year-over-year growth. The number underneath is data center, where the Street is looking for something close to $6.5 billion, roughly double last year, on MI350 shipments and fifth-generation EPYC. Non-GAAP gross margin is guided near 56%.

The stock is already up 5% before the print, borrowing conviction from Palantir's beat and Caterpillar's engine demand. That is the risk. AMD is 13% below its 52-week high of $584.73 and has more than tripled off its $149.22 low, so the position is crowded and the bar is set by sentiment rather than by the guide.

Watch for: quantified Helios rack-scale orders and the Q3 data center guide, not the Q2 beat. Beats are priced. What is not priced is whether AMD can name customers and units the way its larger competitor does. A raise without specificity is how a 5% pre-market gain becomes a red close.

The rest of this briefing is for paid members: the Palantir print that just repriced the entire software complex and the one growth line that actually matters in it, the $1.2 billion data center award nobody covered that put a small-cap up 32% before the open, the optical name that has gained 35% in two sessions with its earnings still ahead of it on Thursday, the storage company that just signed the largest contract in its history, and the satellite launch scheduled for tomorrow morning.

AlphaBriefing Paid gets you every investment thesis, scenario framework and catalyst brief we publish, which is the analysis private intel clients pay four figures for, at a fraction of that.

Unlock the full briefing →