Three central banks delivered decisions last week and the direction was the same in two of them. The Federal Reserve raised rates a quarter point on Wednesday to 3.75–4.00%, its first increase since 2023, and the projections released alongside showed most participants expecting another before the year is out. The Bank of England held at 3.75% on Thursday, with three of nine members voting to raise. The Bank of Japan went to 1.25% on Friday, the highest since 1995. The 10-year Treasury yield ended the week at about 5.00%, a twelve-month high; WTI crude closed Friday at $96.08, after closing Tuesday at $105.83, its highest in four months, on damage to Saudi pipeline infrastructure. The S&P 500 finished the week 0.1% lower, the Dow 1.7% lower and the Nasdaq 0.7% higher, with Friday bringing quarterly index-derivative expiry.
Into that, a thin and lopsided slate. Costco is the only company reporting all week worth more than $80bn, and much of the rest reads as a survey of the consumer and of payrolls: H&M and Kingfisher on European demand, Cintas on US hiring. TD SYNNEX is the clearest read here on AI infrastructure spending, taken through the distribution channel rather than the chipmakers; BlackBerry covers embedded software and secure communications. Exor puts the European holding-company discount back on the table, Abivax carries the sharpest single-asset risk on the slate, and Manchester United closes a year played without European football. Twenty-three names make our calendar.
🇺🇸 Costco
Costco reports fourth-quarter results for the sixteen weeks to 30 August after the US close on Thursday, with the call at 2:00pm Pacific. It is the only mega-cap on the tape and the last big US retail print of the quarter – but the sales line is already published. The monthly release on 2 September put fourth-quarter net sales at $93.9bn, up 11.3%, with total comparable sales of 9.4%, or 6.7% stripping out gasoline and currency; US comparables were 10.7% reported and 7.2% adjusted, and digitally-enabled comparables 19.5%. That closed a 52-week year at $297.3bn, up 10.2%. What Thursday adds is everything below the top line. Consensus sits near $6.55 a share against $5.87. The shares closed Friday at $895.31, 18.3% below their twelve-month high and below both their 50- and 200-day averages, on about 40 times the fiscal 2027 consensus.
Our readGross margin is the swing factor, because the sales are already known and the multiple is not forgiving. Third-quarter gross margin was 11.04%, down 21 basis points and up 1 excluding gas, with lower fresh and food margins and deliberate price investment named as the cause, and management also pointing to a mix shift towards gas, e-commerce and pharmacy. Watch membership fee income against the $1.37bn and 10.7% growth of the third quarter, and the US and Canada renewal rate against 92.2%; executive members against 41.2m; and any sizing of the price investment. The read-across runs to US retail broadly and to packaged-food brands losing shelf to private label – management has said Kirkland Signature is around 30% of sales – with General Mills reporting the morning before.
🇺🇸 Cintas
Cintas reports first-quarter results for the three months to 31 August before the open on Wednesday. Uniform rental revenue tracks headcount at small and mid-sized employers, which makes it one of the cleaner private-payroll reads in public markets – and it lands the same morning as Paychex, which sees the same customer base from the payroll side. The base is strong: fiscal 2026 closed in May with revenue of $11.26bn, up 8.9%, organic growth of 8.3%, a record 50.7% gross margin and adjusted earnings of $4.94 a share. Guidance for fiscal 2027 is $12.10–12.25bn of revenue and $5.36–5.50 of adjusted earnings, on constant currency, no further acquisitions and one extra workday worth about 40 basis points – and it excludes UniFirst. Consensus for Wednesday is about $1.35 against $1.20, on roughly $2.98bn. At the top of the guide the shares trade near 36 times.
Our readOrganic growth is the swing factor, because the gap between what Cintas prints and what it guides is the tell on hiring – though pricing, penetration and retention all sit inside that number alongside headcount. Last year’s first quarter ran 7.8% organic and the fourth 8.4%; the full-year guide of $12.10–12.25bn on $11.26bn is 7.5–8.8% reported, or roughly 7.1–8.4% once the extra workday comes out, and that is before acquisition carryover. Watch gross margin against the 51.0% of the fourth quarter, which is where pricing meets wage inflation and where a multiple this high raises the bar; whether the annual guide moves, as it did at this point last year; and any update on UniFirst, where an FTC second request in June left the company still pointing to a close in the second half of this calendar year. The read-across runs to Paychex and ADP on the same employment base, and to UniFirst holders on the odds of the deal.
🇸🇪 H&M
H&M publishes its nine-month report before the Stockholm open on Thursday, covering June to August – the biggest non-US print of the week. The second quarter set the shape: net sales of SEK 54,828m, fairly in line with the prior year in local currencies against about 3% fewer stores, but a gross margin of 56.6% against 55.4% and operating profit before restructuring costs up 11% to SEK 6,592m. Profitability is being won in the supply chain and the cost base rather than on the shop floor, and the company said June sales in local currencies were expected to be on par with a year earlier. Inditex, reporting a week and a half ago, put its own constant-currency sales up about 9% from 1 August to 7 September. Consensus compiled by Modular Finance has third-quarter net sales at SEK 57,120m, a 53.4% gross margin and SEK 5,095m of operating profit, against SEK 57,017m, 52.9% and SEK 4,914m a year ago.
Our readWhether the gross margin can widen again is the swing factor, and a repeat of the second quarter’s 120 basis points is harder to assume. The company said external factors would be flat year on year for goods sold in the third quarter, that markdowns should run at the same level, and – the important part – that the supply-chain actions which lifted the margin from the third quarter of 2025 now sit inside the comparative base. That puts more of the weight on sales growth and on fresh efficiencies, and June was flat. Watch the September sales line, which H&M gives with the report; Western Europe, down 3% in local currencies in the second quarter with the UK singled out; and stock-in-trade at 15.8% of rolling sales against a 12–14% long-term target. The read-across is to European apparel, and to how wide the Inditex gap is allowed to get.
🇺🇸 TD SYNNEX
TD SYNNEX reports third-quarter results for the three months to 31 August before the open on Thursday, with the call at 9:00am Eastern. It is the clearest AI-infrastructure read on this slate, taken from the distribution end of the chain rather than from the chipmakers. The second quarter was a record: non-GAAP gross billings of $28.9bn, up 33%, revenue of $19.6bn, up 31%, and non-GAAP earnings of $4.85 a share, up 62%, with Hyve – which builds data-centre hardware for the large cloud providers – lifting its own non-GAAP gross billings 117%. Third-quarter guidance is $27.2–28.2bn of gross billings, $18.2–19.0bn of revenue and $4.25–4.75 of non-GAAP earnings, and management said it assumes no material contribution from newly onboarded Hyve customers. Consensus sits in the middle at about $4.68 on $18.8bn. The shares are up roughly 77% this year and trade near 14 times the fiscal 2026 consensus.
Our readMargin, not growth, is the swing factor. Hyve’s non-GAAP operating margin was 3.3% in the second quarter, 50 basis points below a year earlier on mix and ramp costs, and the question the market is asking of a stock that has re-rated this hard is whether hyperscaler revenue at that margin is worth carrying. Watch cash generation, where free cash flow was negative $332m in the second quarter as working capital absorbed the growth; the gross billings mix between Hyve and the endpoint business, where a PC refresh cycle has been the other contributor; and whether the newly onboarded Hyve customers management excluded from guidance have started to contribute. The read-across runs to the AI-capex complex generally, and this is a curtain-raiser for Micron at the end of the month.
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🇳🇱 Exor
Exor publishes its half-year report on Tuesday. The Agnelli family holding company is a net-asset-value story rather than an operating one, and the listed underlyings – Ferrari, Stellantis, CNH and Philips – have all reported already, so what the half adds is the holdco balance sheet and whatever John Elkann says about deploying cash. At the March full-year release, gross asset value was €37.1bn and NAV €33.2bn, after NAV per share fell 8.1% in 2025 against a 5.4% rise in the MSCI World Index; loan-to-value was 6.9% against a 15% target. Exor said signed disposals of Iveco, GEDI, Lifenet and NUO would generate about €2bn this year at more than 1.4 times invested capital, taking cash available for deployment above €3.5bn – enough, on the company’s own framing, for a new investment on the scale of Philips. The shares closed Friday at €68.50, down about 16% over twelve months, worth roughly €14bn – though the €33.2bn they are set against is a 31 December 2025 figure, so the gap is an approximation rather than a live one.
Our readWhat Exor does with the money is the swing factor, because the discount is the investment case and more than one thing can narrow it: underlying performance, disposals at or above carrying value, simplification, or buying something that works. Watch the NAV bridge for the half and how much of it Stellantis accounts for; whether the signed disposals have completed, and what that leaves against the €3.5bn of deployment capacity the company has pointed to; and whether Exor has moved off the “cash is king” stance John Elkann set out in March, when he said no further buybacks were planned for 2026. Half-year numbers from a holding company rarely move the shares on their own, and there is little here to suggest this one will. The read-across is to the European holdco complex – Investor AB, Industrivärden, Groupe Bruxelles Lambert – where the same argument about discounts is being had.
🇫🇷 Abivax
Abivax reports first-half results after the US close on Monday, and the numbers are the least interesting part of it. This is effectively a single-asset biotech: obefazimod, a once-daily oral therapy for moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis, with a US filing planned for late in the fourth quarter after a pre-NDA meeting the company described in July as positive. The Phase 3 maintenance data in June showed clinical remission at week 44 of 50.8% on the 25mg dose and 51.3% on 50mg against 10.4% on placebo. The share price has been anything but steady around it: the stock fell sharply on 2 June on malignancy cases at the higher dose, then recovered when follow-up data led the company to say the exposure-adjusted malignancy rate was consistent with background rates in ulcerative colitis. In July it raised roughly $920m gross at $125 an ADS to fund a US launch of its own, extending the runway into the second quarter of 2029. The shares closed Friday at $105.04.
Our readThe commentary is the swing factor, not the profit and loss; consensus coverage of the half is too thin and too loosely labelled to be worth quoting. Watch anything that moves the late-fourth-quarter filing date, since that anchors every launch assumption in the model; the build-out of a US commercial organisation, which is what July’s raise was for and the first real evidence that going it alone is deliverable; and any further safety disclosure, which is what this market has proved most sensitive to. The read-across runs to the ulcerative-colitis competitive set and, more loosely, to how much a late-stage European biotech can now raise on its own account.
🇬🇧 Kingfisher
Kingfisher reports half-year results to 31 July before the London open on Tuesday – the cleanest read on UK and French home improvement, and a useful rate-sensitivity proxy given how much of it is big-ticket. The first quarter was soft: group like-for-like sales fell 0.9%, or 0.7% stripping out the calendar shift, with B&Q down 4.1% on a late spring, France down 2.1% and Screwfix up 4.1%; trade sales excluding Screwfix rose 17% and marketplace gross merchandise value 39% to £163m. Guidance was left at £565–625m of adjusted pre-tax profit against £560m last year, with free cash flow of £450–510m and a £300m buyback running. The comparative is demanding: last year’s first half delivered £368m of adjusted pre-tax profit, up 10.2%, on a gross margin of 37.7%. The shares closed Friday at 301.8p, about twelve times the January 2027 consensus.
Our readWhether B&Q recovered once spring arrived is the swing factor. That £368m first half left £192m for the second; repeat it and the £565–625m guide asks £197–257m of this year’s second half, so the weight of the year sits after July. Watch the gross margin against 37.7%, since margin discipline rather than volume has done most of the profit work for two years; France, where Castorama was down 1.1% and Brico Dépôt 3.1% like-for-like in the first quarter; and the current-trading line for August and September, which matters more than the half that has just closed. The read-across is to UK consumer names heading into the autumn Budget and, through France, Poland and Iberia, to European big-ticket spending – though a retailer of this size travels only so far.
🇨🇦 BlackBerry
BlackBerry reports second-quarter results for the three months to 31 August before the open on Thursday. The shares have more than doubled this year and are still about 38% below the closing high they set on 1 July, after a July fall that coincided with disclosures of insider selling and followed a rally that had run roughly 185% from April. The first quarter was good: revenue of $152.9m, up 26%, with QNX at $72.3m on an 86% adjusted gross margin, Secure Communications at $73.6m, adjusted EBITDA of $36.3m and what the company called its first fiscal first quarter of positive operating cash flow in nine years; QNX royalty backlog stood at $950m. The guidance for the quarter being reported steps down, though: total revenue of $137–148m, Secure Communications of $57–63m against $73.6m, and adjusted EBITDA of $20–30m against $36.3m. Non-GAAP consensus sits at $0.04 on about $144m.
Our readSecure Communications is the swing factor, not QNX. The $57–63m segment guide implies a sequential fall of 14–23% from $73.6m, and the dollar-based net retention rate was 92% in the first quarter – meaning revenue from the measured existing-customer base contracted about 8% before new business is counted, which is not the same as the installed base shrinking. Watch QNX against the $70–75m guide and whether the royalty backlog grows from $950m, since that is the part of the story the re-rating was built on; the full-year outlook of $594–621m of revenue and $0.16–0.20 of non-GAAP earnings, lifted in June; and any first design win for Alloy Kore, which management has said it expects within this fiscal year. The read-across is thin: at under $5bn this is a stock story rather than a market signal.
🇬🇧 Manchester United
Manchester United reports fourth-quarter and full-year results for the year to 30 June before the US open on Wednesday – the only sports-franchise profit and loss account on the tape, and a year played with no European football at all. It went better than that implies. Through nine months, revenue was £520.1m, up 3.5%, adjusted EBITDA £187.5m, up 29.0%, and operating profit £37.7m against a £3.2m loss, as the cost and headcount programme came through. Guidance was raised in May to £655–665m of revenue and £200–210m of adjusted EBITDA, which implies a fourth quarter of roughly £135–145m and £13–23m. The men’s team finished third in the Premier League and qualified for the Champions League for 2026/27. Dollar borrowings at 31 March stood at $650m, alongside £260m drawn on the revolving facility and £60.9m of cash; in June, inside the year being reported, the club placed $550m of 5.36% notes due 2031 to repay $425m of 3.79% notes due 2027 and pushed its $225m term loan out to the same date.
Our readThe fiscal 2027 outlook is the swing factor, because the year being reported should prove the trough and the Champions League money lands in the year ahead. Watch whatever the club says about 2026/27 revenue, where a league-phase campaign on top of a fuller matchday and commercial year is the step change; the closing net debt and the interest line, since June’s refinancing took the coupon on the notes from 3.79% to 5.36% and added $125m of dollar principal against sterling income; and the stadium plan, where how a 100,000-seat project would be funded is still unresolved. Football accounts turn on qualification rather than the cycle, so there is no read-through here to anything else on this list.
Weekly Calendar
Some notable names reporting this week, after a week in which the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England and the Bank of Japan all decided. An “(exp.)” marks an entry the company has not confirmed in full: usually a confirmed date with no stated publication time, where the timing follows the home market’s convention rather than the company’s own notice, and in a few cases a date taken from calendar services with no company notice behind it. “Not stated” marks an entry where neither the company nor a settled convention gives a time.
| Company | Country | Sector | Timing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday 21-Sep | |||
| Abivax | 🇫🇷 | Clinical-stage biotech | AMC |
| Remgro | 🇿🇦 | Investment holding company | BMO (exp.) |
| Tuesday 22-Sep | |||
| AutoZone | 🇺🇸 | Automotive parts retail | BMO |
| Exor | 🇳🇱 | Investment holding company | Post-close (exp.) |
| Smiths Group | 🇬🇧 | Diversified engineering & technology | BMO (exp.) |
| Kingfisher | 🇬🇧 | Home-improvement retail | BMO |
| Thor Industries | 🇺🇸 | Recreational vehicles | BMO |
| KB Home | 🇺🇸 | Homebuilding | AMC |
| Wednesday 23-Sep | |||
| Cintas | 🇺🇸 | Uniform rental & facility services | BMO |
| Paychex | 🇺🇸 | Payroll & HR services | BMO |
| General Mills | 🇺🇸 | Packaged foods | BMO |
| Renishaw | 🇬🇧 | Precision metrology & healthcare | BMO (exp.) |
| Nine Dragons Paper | 🇨🇳 | Containerboard & recycled paper | Post-close (exp.) |
| Manchester United | 🇬🇧 | Professional football club | BMO |
| KWS SAAT | 🇩🇪 | Crop seed breeding | BMO |
| Thursday 24-Sep | |||
| Costco Wholesale | 🇺🇸 | Membership warehouse retail | AMC |
| H&M Hennes & Mauritz | 🇸🇪 | Fashion retail | BMO |
| Darden Restaurants | 🇺🇸 | Full-service restaurants | BMO |
| TD SYNNEX | 🇺🇸 | IT distribution & solutions aggregation | BMO |
| Washington H. Soul Pattinson | 🇦🇺 | Diversified investment house | BMO (exp.) |
| Uranium Energy | 🇺🇸 | Uranium mining | BMO (exp.) |
| BlackBerry | 🇨🇦 | Embedded & secure-communications software | BMO |
| Jumbo | 🇬🇷 | Toys, home & general merchandise retail | Not stated |