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Welcome to your new week.
Meta and SpaceX get their first chance to prove the AI spending boom is paying off, just as a two-week chip selloff tests investors' patience.
Brent crude near $110 and a 7.4% mortgage rate set the backdrop for housing data and flash PMIs, the last big reads before the Fed meets October 27–28.
Let’s dive in.
Key Earnings Announcements:
Netflix, Tesla, Meta, and SpaceX headline the busiest week of earnings season.
Monday (10/19): Cleveland-Cliffs, Fifth Third Bancorp, Steel Dynamics, W.R. Berkley, Zions Bancorporation.
Tuesday (10/20): 3M, Capital One, Chubb, GE Aerospace, General Motors, Halliburton, Hasbro, Intuitive Surgical, Netflix, Northrop Grumman, RTX, SpaceX, United Airlines.
Wednesday (10/21): Abbott Laboratories, AT&T, CME Group, Danaher, IBM, Lam Research, Meta Platforms, NextEra Energy, Philip Morris, Tesla, Texas Instruments, Thermo Fisher Scientific.
Thursday (10/22): American Airlines, Blackstone, Comcast, Dow, Lockheed Martin, Newmont, Nokia, Procter & Gamble, Tractor Supply, Valero Energy, Western Digital.
Friday (10/23): American Express, Autoliv, Booz Allen Hamilton, SLB.
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What We’re Watching:
Meta (META)
Meta Platforms (+7.5% YTD) reports Wednesday after the close, with shares ending Friday at $709.33. Consensus calls for roughly $63.3 billion of revenue, up 24% year over year. The setup is straightforward: Meta’s advertising business is still compounding at an exceptional rate, but investors now want proof that its massive AI spending is creating something beyond a better ad algorithm. This is the first earnings report since Muse launched in September, giving management its first chance to put real numbers around the personal AI agent opportunity.
Last quarter, revenue rose 28% to $60.8 billion as ad impressions increased 14% and average price per ad climbed another 12%. But the spending was just as striking. Capital expenditures reached $31.1 billion against $31.9 billion of operating cash flow, leaving just $784 million of free cash flow for the quarter. Meta now expects as much as $145 billion of capital spending this year, making the return on that investment increasingly important.
This quarter, watch ad pricing, any early framework for 2027 spending, and the first real discussion of Muse monetization. The agent has already approached 9 million downloads, with Meta rolling out more capable Muse Wonder models and paid tiers at $20 and $100 per month. If the ad engine stays strong while Muse begins showing real engagement and paid adoption, investors have a much easier time underwriting the AI buildout. If spending keeps accelerating without evidence of a new revenue stream, the capex debate stays wide open.
"We're the only major company building AI with the primary goal of putting superintelligence directly into people's hands."
Meta Platforms (META) Stock Performance, 5-Year Chart, Seeking Alpha
SpaceX (SPCX)
SpaceX (+8.2% since its IPO) reports Tuesday after the close, its first full quarter as a public company. Shares finished Friday at $146.03, still above the $135 IPO price but 27.6% below their June 16 record close. Wall Street expects roughly $12.9 billion of revenue and $0.14 in EPS, which would mark SpaceX’s first profitable quarter since going public. The bigger test is whether those numbers support Elon Musk’s claim that the company is already on track for a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by December.
Last quarter, revenue jumped 92% to $7.8 billion as AI revenue more than tripled to $2.56 billion and Starlink connectivity reached $4.29 billion on 12 million subscribers. SpaceX still lost $541 million as capital spending climbed to $18.4 billion, much of it tied to AI compute. The stock fell 13.6% the next day, showing that investors are willing to reward the growth — but not at any cost.
This quarter, AI is the swing factor. Cursor joined the business in August, while $6.7 billion of newly signed cloud contracts begin ramping in October, making the Q4 outlook almost as important as Q3 itself. Watch whether compute capacity remains on track to exceed 2 gigawatts by year-end and whether management sticks with the $100 billion December run-rate target. Starlink is another piece after Starship reached orbit and deployed its first V3 satellites in September, potentially unlocking a major step-up in network capacity. If SpaceX can show that AI revenue is scaling fast enough to absorb the compute buildout while Starlink accelerates alongside it, the company starts looking less like three expensive businesses under one roof and more like three growth engines feeding each other.
"To be clear, the $100 billion ARR in December is not a question mark. That's what we'd achieve if we basically did nothing."
SpaceX (SPCX) Stock Performance, YTD Chart, Seeking Alpha
Investor Events / Global Affairs:
JPMorgan / Robinhood Investors Conference, Nvidia's European pitch, and Kroger's reset.
JPMorgan / Robinhood Investors Conference
Source: Robin Hood; 2025 Investors Conference
The J.P. Morgan / Robin Hood Investors Conference returns to New York on Wednesday, with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent in a 4:45 p.m. fireside chat right after Stan Druckenmiller interviews Paul Tudor Jones. The agenda also includes a SpaceX IPO roundtable with short seller Jim Chanos, Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour on prediction markets, and Nate Silver on the midterms.
Bessent arrives with the 10-year Treasury yield near 5.1% and a fiscal 2026 deficit just under $2 trillion. He has argued the U.S. should get the deficit below 4% of GDP by the end of President Trump's term.
Jones set the tone last week, telling CNBC that 2027 will be "really, really challenging" for stocks as SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI add a wave of new share supply, and that he plans to be short the whole year. Watch whether Druckenmiller agrees, and whether Bessent hints at any change in Treasury issuance to take pressure off long-term yields.
"My view is that we've got this mountain of debt, and we have to grow our way out of it."
Nvidia's European pitch
Source: NVIDIA; GTC Paris keynote
Nvidia's GTC Berlin runs Tuesday through Thursday, and Jensen Huang delivers the keynote Wednesday at 11 a.m. local time, or 5 a.m. ET, at the Tempodrom. It caps a European tour that already produced minority stakes in five U.K. startups and a promise of another $2 billion in European AI deals, on top of roughly $8 billion Nvidia invested in the region over the past year.
The timing is awkward. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index fell 11.4% last week as debt worries at CoreWeave and a 10-year yield near 5.1% hit the AI trade. Nvidia closed Friday at $214.13, up 14.8% this year but 10.5% below its October 6 record close.
Sovereign AI is Huang's counterweight. Nvidia's sovereign revenue tripled to more than $30 billion last fiscal year, demand that does not depend on the debt-funded data center buildout now worrying investors. Watch for named European deals, new AI factory capacity in Germany, and whether Huang addresses how customers are financing their chip purchases.
"Every single company will be an AI company eventually. Every single industry will be impacted by AI."
Kroger's Reset
Source: Fortune; Getty Images
Kroger hosts its 2026 Investor Day Tuesday from 9 a.m. to noon ET, the first long-range plan under CEO Greg Foran. The former Walmart U.S. chief took over in February and will present with CFO David Kennerley. Shares closed Friday at $63.63, up 1.8% this year but well below their March high.
Foran inherits slowing sales. Second-quarter identical sales excluding fuel rose just 0.2%, down from 3.4% a year earlier, and Kroger cut its full-year sales outlook while holding its earnings guidance. The bright spots were digital sales, up 20%, and retail media, up 24%.
Foran is cutting 3,000 corporate jobs over three years and speeding up new store openings. Watch for multi-year sales and margin targets, how much of the savings go back into prices, and how Kroger plans to compete with Walmart and Costco without starting a price war.
"We do not need to be the lowest-priced retailer."
Major Economic Events:
Housing and business surveys are the last major reads before the Fed meets.
Monday (10/19): NAHB Housing Market Index.
Tuesday (10/20): ADP weekly employment update; September housing starts and building permits; Redbook retail sales; September pending home sales.
Wednesday (10/21): MBA mortgage applications; EIA crude oil inventories; 20-year Treasury bond auction.
Thursday (10/22): Initial and continuing jobless claims; September Conference Board Leading Economic Index; October Kansas City Fed manufacturing survey; Freddie Mac mortgage rates.
Friday (10/23): October S&P Global flash manufacturing and services PMIs; final October University of Michigan consumer sentiment.
What We’re Watching:
September Housing Starts
Tuesday's housing starts report is the first full look at builders since mortgage rates crossed 7% in late September. The Wall Street Journal's survey calls for starts to rise to an annual pace of 1.31 million, with permits expected at 1.40 million. Builder confidence fell to 32 in September, the lowest in a year, and Monday's NAHB index is expected to slip again.
August starts fell 2.6% to 1.275 million, but the mix mattered. Single-family starts rose 7.6% while volatile apartment construction dropped 21.7%. Builders are paying up to keep buyers: 66% offered incentives in September and 38% cut prices, according to the NAHB.
Single-family starts are the number to watch. Builders broke ground on September's homes after rates had already started climbing, so a drop would show the rate shock is reaching construction. Capital Economics expects starts to keep falling, with data center construction propping up building jobs. A weak print would add to the case that the Fed's hikes are already slowing the economy.
Economists expect the following:
Housing starts: 1.31 million annual pace vs. 1.275 million
"The housing market was not in a robust place to start off with. And then with mortgage rates moving up the way they have, I think we're going to see a challenging couple months ahead."
October Flash PMIs
Friday's flash PMIs are the last broad read on growth before the Fed meets. S&P Global's September composite index hit 58.4, its strongest since July 2021, with services leading. The Wall Street Journal's survey expects only a slight cooling in October for both services and manufacturing.
The details are what worry the Fed. Input costs rose at the fastest pace in nearly four years on fuel, transport, and wages, supplier delivery times stretched the most since 2022, and backlogs kept building. S&P Global says the surveys point to growth of about 4% in the third quarter.
Watch the price gauges more than the headlines. Markets price about a 15% chance of a hike on October 28 and fully expect one by December, after September core CPI came in above forecasts. A hot October survey with rising selling prices would pull that hike forward; a sharp drop in services would ease the pressure.
Economists expect the following:
Flash services PMI: 58.1 vs. 58.8 prior
"While this accumulation of uncompleted orders bodes well for the further expansion of output and capacity in the coming months, it also indicates that companies are developing more pricing power, and hence is a worry for the inflation outlook."
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Cover Image Source: Todd Owyoung; Getty Images
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