Nvidia's 'Second Quarter' Ended July 26. DICK'S Ended Aug. 1. Intuit's Report Tonight Closes a Fiscal Year.

by Clara Borresen · August 25, 2026

Senior Earnings Analyst, Earnings Dispatch

The tidiest thing about earnings season is the label. Every one of the reports arriving this week gets filed under the same two characters — Q2 — and almost none of them cover the same three months. That is worth pinning down before the scorecards get written, because the index-level figure most readers will see quoted this week was calculated on a different set of periods from the ones the week's biggest reports actually cover.

Start with the index number. FactSet's Earnings Insight report dated August 7 put the blended second-quarter earnings growth rate for the S&P 500 at 50.4% with 88% of companies having reported, against 47.4% a week earlier and 23.1% at the end of the quarter. Blended revenue growth was 15.0%. Eighty-six percent of reporters had beaten earnings estimates, against a five-year average of 78% and a ten-year average of 76%, and 76% had beaten revenue estimates, against a five-year average of 70%. The forward 12-month price-to-earnings ratio stood at 20.0.

The sector that led that number is the one most likely to be confused with the retail reports arriving this week. FactSet put Consumer Discretionary earnings growth at 91.6%, and identified Broadline Retail as the industry driving it at roughly 240%, followed by Textiles, Apparel and Luxury Goods at 59% and Automobiles at 18%. The report attributes the bulk of it to a single earnings surprise: Amazon.com's $5.75 a share against an estimate of $1.82, helped by a $53.4 billion gain in other income primarily tied to investments in Anthropic. FactSet notes that excluding Amazon, the sector's blended growth rate would fall to 7.5% from 91.6%.

None of that has anything to do with the store retailers on this week's calendar, whose quarters ended weeks after the calendar quarter closed. DICK'S Sporting Goods, which reported Tuesday morning, was reporting on the 13 weeks ended August 1, 2026 — a period that contains all of July, a month the June-quarter reporters in the FactSet blend do not touch. Its comparable-sales split, positive 4.9% at the DICK'S business and negative 3.6% at Foot Locker on the company's proforma basis, describes a July that Amazon's June quarter simply did not include.

Nvidia is on a third calendar again. The company said in a release dated July 29 that it will report results for the second quarter of fiscal 2027, ended July 26, 2026, on Wednesday, August 26, at 2 p.m. Pacific time, or 5 p.m. Eastern. The quarter has ended; the report has not happened. Its fiscal year label is 2027, its quarter label is second, and its period is the one that closed in late July.

What Nvidia has published is guidance, given with its first-quarter results on May 20. The company said second-quarter revenue is expected to be $91.0 billion, plus or minus 2%; GAAP gross margin 74.9% and non-GAAP gross margin 75.0%, each plus or minus 50 basis points; and GAAP operating expenses of approximately $8.5 billion against non-GAAP operating expenses of approximately $8.3 billion. It put GAAP and non-GAAP tax rates for the full fiscal year at 16.0% to 18.0%, excluding discrete items.

Nvidia's own first quarter is a useful warning about which earnings line to read. For the quarter ended April 26, 2026, the company reported revenue of $81.6 billion, GAAP diluted earnings per share of $2.39 and non-GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.87 — the reported figure above the adjusted one, which is the reverse of the usual arrangement. The reconciliation shows why: $15.936 billion of gains from equity securities, net, sit inside GAAP net income of $58.321 billion and are stripped out of non-GAAP net income of $45.548 billion. Data Center revenue was $75.2 billion, and GAAP and non-GAAP gross margins were 74.9% and 75.0%.

Intuit, reporting after the close on Tuesday, is on a fourth convention entirely. Its report is not a second quarter at all: it covers the fiscal fourth quarter and the full fiscal year ended July 31, 2026. Any tally that files tonight's Intuit print alongside the June-quarter cohort is putting a fiscal-year close in a quarterly bucket.

The rest of the week compounds the problem rather than resolving it. Kiplinger's earnings calendar for August 24 to 28, accessed August 25, has Abercrombie & Fitch, Bath & Body Works, Kohl's and Williams-Sonoma reporting Wednesday morning, and Best Buy, Burlington Stores, Dollar General and Dollar Tree Thursday morning, alongside Box, HEICO, nCino, Semtech and Zoom Communications after Tuesday's bell. Most of the retailers on that list run on the same late-July or early-August quarter end that DICK'S does.

There is no scandal in any of this. Fiscal calendars exist for good operational reasons, and FactSet's blend is a defensible construction for what it measures. The practical point is narrower: a reader who takes 50.4% as a description of "how the quarter went" and then reaches for this week's prints as confirmation is mixing periods, and in the Consumer Discretionary case is mixing a single online retailer's June quarter with a group of store retailers' July.

The version of the scorecard that survives contact with the calendar is the boring one. Check the period end date in the release. Check whether the label is a fiscal or a calendar quarter. Check whether the earnings figure you are comparing is the reported one or the adjusted one. Three checks, all of them answerable from the first page of the document, and all three change the answer this week.