Hello, I'm Eric Criscuolo, Market Strategist at the New York Stock Exchange, and this is Market Storylines. Every week we’re here to keep you up to date on the key trends and events driving global markets. We’re recording on Thursday, February 26. Now let’s dive in.

To set the stage, last week was a holiday shortened week, but it was packed with records, reversals and comebacks. The USA women’s hockey team won Olympic gold with a thrilling OT win, and then the men’s team followed the same script to complete the Hockey sweep. The 232 members of the entire Team USA contingent won a national record 12 gold medals and 33 overall, and they gave me memories of celebrating with my family that I will never forget. Thank you and congratulations to all the incredible athletes.

While I’d love to just talk Olympic events, this isn’t ESPN. In between the two gold medal wins was news from our favorite Supreme Court on our favorite topic: tariffs. After a few months of waiting for a decision, the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s IEEPA tariffs last Friday. The decision was not unexpected however, as Polymarket odds for this outcome had been around 70% for a while. The administration quickly slapped new 10% tariffs on under a new authority, then upped them to 15%.

The S&P 500 spent most of the week ping-ponging back and forth between its 50 and 100 day moving averages and remained trapped in a larger 250pt range between 6750 and 7000.

My colleague Michael and I have talked to you a lot about the rolling wave of sell-offs that have swept across industry groups, triggered by concerns of AI-driven disruption. As we started this week, the latest winter storm blasted the northeast, but a report by Citrini Research sent another storm through the markets that continued to push that wave inland. The write-up, which was more a scenario-analysis or thought-experiment versus a dire prediction, laid out a near-term hypothetical of AI triggering massive disruption, spiking unemployment and economic displacement. As Bill Murray said, “Dogs and Cats, Living Together…Mass Hysteria!”

With a market already concerned, for a while, about how to model the impact of AI- good and bad- the report helped bring a sea of red across the tape on Monday. Software got smoked again and Financials were hit hard as the Citrini report’s unemployment scenario smacked consumer credit areas like credit cards and banks, piling on to the already-present concerns radiating from Private Credit and potential bad loans to software companies. More disruption concerns appeared after Anthropic said its Claude Code could be used to modernize COBOL, the ancient computer language that runs a scary huge amount of finance infrastructure and created big businesses for companies like IBM.

I’m not a pessimist thought and I want to keep the positive vibes from the Olympics going. While the start of the week was ugly, the overall move was modest. The S&P finished down 1%, an average bad day. Also, some of the weakness could be attributed to under-staffed trading desks due to the storm and the options expiration from last week. After a night of sleep, equities bounced the next day and recouped most of Monday’s losses. Software found stable ground, which continued for the rest of the week. The source of much software angst, Anthropic, provided an olive branch, after its corporate event was more about forging partnerships than ushering in total economic disruption.

This brings us to the other big item this week: Nvidia earnings. The pillar of the AI story reported Wednesday night and posted stellar numbers. However, that was largely expected, and one of the reasons why the S&P has been rangebound. The bar is incredibly high for prices to inflect meaningfully higher. In fact, despite 70% topline growth, Nvidia is down about 5% after reporting.

Besides the numbers, the biggest takeaways were (1) investment in AI buildout shows no signs of slowing down, keeping the foot on the AI spending pedal, (2) Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said “the Chat GPT moment of agentic AI has arrived”, signaling evolution into prolific and specifically tuned applications of the technology beyond content generation, and (3) the ability of software providers to greatly benefit from this, in direct contrast to the narrative we discussed. Speaking of software, bellwethers Salesforce and Snowflake also reported. Results were solid with no signs of disruptive forces at play. Both names are trading higher. The IGV software ETF is up about 2% and today has flipped with the hardware group in terms of performance as the rest of the semis complex follows Nvidia lower. We’ll be watching to see if this countertrend continues- hardware weaker, software stronger. If so, that would add to the significant rotations in the equity market we’ve already seen this year.

The risk-off market stance this week is showing up in sector performance. The defensive Utilities and Consumer Staples are leading while Consumer Discretionary and Comm Services are lagging. Financials have stabilized. The rest of the sectors are bending but not breaking, providing enough support to keep the S&P 500 floating within its longer-term range. The 100 day moving average continues to provide support and the 50-day is proving a difficult level from which to see any sustained upside. We’ll see if todays’ move can be sustained. We’re currently flat for the week while the equal-weight index is up slightly and small cap indexes are flat to slightly lower.

Looking at other assets, crude is lower this week as the US/Iran nuclear negotiations take place. The commodity rose as tensions ramped, and the overhang of a US military strike remains. Precious metals are looking to add to last week’s gains. Crypto had one day of real strength on Wednesday but otherwise is unable to create sustained upside momentum. Bitcoin is struggling to reclaim the $70k level.

The risk-off environment put a modest bid into Treasuries, with yields down about 5bp at the long end, though most of the move happened Monday.

Now, let’s take a look at what’s coming up.

Dell, Autodesk, Block, CoreWeave and Intuit will report after the close on Thursday. January PPI will be reported tomorrow.

Next week we get to flip the calendar to March. But before that, Berkshire Hathaway will issue its Q4 earnings and 2025 Annual Report on Saturday. This will include the first shareholder letter from new CEO Greg Abel, the first time someone other than Mr. Buffet has penned the letter in 60 years.

Earnings next week will be heavy with big retail and consumer-focused names: Norwegian Cruise Lines, AutoZone, Best Buy, Target, Ross Stores, Abercrombie, Brown Forman, Bath and Body Works, American Eagle, BJ’s Wholesale, Burlington Stores, Kroger, Costco and Gap are just some of the companies reporting. Tech names will include ASML, Broadcom, Marvell and CrowdStrike.

Labor market data will headline the macro releases with February non-farm payrolls released next Friday. The ADP February employment report, Challenger Job Cuts and weekly jobless claims will be released earlier in the week. Q4 Productivity and Labor Costs will also be released.

For non-labor data, ISM Manufacturing and Service PMIs for February will be released on Monday and Wednesday, respectively. The Fed’s Biege Book, which provides commentary of economic conditions across the 12 Fed Districts, will be out. Other releases include Retail Sales, Consumer Credit balances, Inventories and Import/Export prices.

Internationally, China’s National People’s Congress begins next week, where they should lay out economic goals including GDP. Data includes European CPI, Retail Sales and Unemployment, global Manufacturing and Services PMIs and German Factory Orders.

That’s a wrap for this week. You can watch Market Storylines on TV.NYSE.com or on the NYSE YouTube Channel. You can also listen on the Inside the ICE House Podcast feed. Thanks for joining me. I’m Eric Criscuolo. We’ll see ya next week.