Wall Street delivered a mixed performance last week. The S&P 500 added about 0.5%, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost about 0.6%, and the Nasdaq-100 surged about 1.1% as growth stocks rallied on hopes that the Fed will keep interest rates unchanged at its September meeting, easing earlier concerns about a potential rate hike.
Cooling Inflation Cools Fed Rate-Hike Bets
Expectations for another Federal Reserve rate hike have cooled following the latest inflation data. The annual inflation rate in the United States slowed for a second successive month to 3.4% in July 2026, from 3.5% in June, in line with expectations.
The impact of the energy shock caused by the war with Iran continued to ease. On a monthly basis, the CPI rose 0.1% as expected, rebounding from a 0.4% decline in June.
The chances of the Fed keeping interest rates unchanged at its September meeting have now risen to 66.9%, up from 51.5% a month ago, per CME FedWatchTool (at the time of writing).
The benign inflation report came shortly after July's disappointing jobs data, which showed an unexpected loss of 23,000 nonfarm jobs. The combination of softer inflation and a weakening labor market has reduced the urgency for the Fed to raise interest rates at its September meeting.
NVIDIA's $500B AI Push
NVIDIANVDA announced last week that it had entered into memorandums of understanding with Apollo Global Management (APO), BlackRock (BLK), Blackstone (BX), Brookfield (BAM), Goldman Sachs (GS) and KKR (KKR) to establish financing platforms aimed at supporting its customers, as quoted on CNBC (read: Does NVIDIA's $500B AI Push Open a New Opportunity for Financial ETFs?).
Winning Leveraged ETFs in Focus
Against this backdrop, below we highlight a few winning leveraged ETFs of last week.
Graniteshares 2X Long NBIS Daily ETFNBIL – Up 107.3%
Nebius GroupNBIS – an AI-centric cloud platform built for intensive AI workloads – saw its shares surge about 50% last week.Â
Leverage Shares 2X Long SNDK Daily ETFSNDG – Up 80.3%
SanDiskSNDK’ shares – developer and seller of data storage devices and solutions based on NAND flash technology – added 36.3% last week. Â
Leverage Shares 2X Long AEHR Daily ETFAEHG – Up 56.9%
Aehr Test SystemsAEHR – developer of systems which are designed to reduce the cost of testing DRAMs and other memory devices – saw its shares surge 27.7% last week.
Defiance Daily Target 2X Long UMAC ETFUMAL – Up 48.6%
Shares of Unusual MachinesUMAC a manufacturer of U.S.-made, NDAA-compliant drone components and small unmanned aircraft systems, added about 28.1% last week.
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