Earthquakes and hurricanes shook things up in August, but this is September now.
There are plenty of manmade events that will shape the market in the coming weeks.
Here are a few of the days that I plan to approach with eyes wide open this month.
Sept. 1
The most important month -- ever -- for Netflix
It's a defining moment for the service, and one that will either find the company validating its model with chunkier margins to boot or leave Netflix scrambling to cope with a dramatic uptick in churn.
Subscribers will begin paying the new rates through their September billing cycle, so we should know where things stand shortly after the end of the third quarter.
Netflix is optimistic. It sees 22 million of its 25 million U.S. subscribers paying $7.99 a month to stream from its growing digital library, and almost half of its users paying for both the streaming and DVD plans. How sticky is Netflix? We're about to find out.
Sept. 13
Best Buy
Best Buy has delivered three consecutive quarters of year-over-year declines in comparable-store sales and profitability. Analysts aren't all that excited about the meandering retailer this time around. They see Best Buy checking in with a profit of $0.54 a share, well short of the $0.60 a share it posted a year earlier.
The success of more nimble online retailers offering better pricing and the digital revolution that is replacing the demand for physical CDs, DVDs, books, and video games are making life harder for Best Buy.
Sept. 13 is also the day when Nintendo will be hosting a 3DS event in Tokyo for analysts and investors. All eyes are on the video game pioneer after a desperate 32% price cut on the handheld system that it had introduced just five months earlier.
Shares of Nintendo recently hit a five-year low, so any good news will be welcome. Nintendo will likely be hyping up new 3DS software titles that will be out before the holiday shopping season. Rumors are circulating of a radical redesign, but that seems unlikely since it would crush any holiday momentum that the August price cut may have created. New games and peripherals are the better bet, and even then Nintendo is still going to have a hard time against the improving quality of smartphone games that are practically being given away.
Sept. 22
There aren't too many earnings reports slated for September, but an important one will come from FedEx
Even if you're not a shareholder, FedEx's financials carry a fair deal of economic weight. If companies are sending more documents and parcels around -- and consumers aren't fretting over paying a little more for speedy deliveries -- the economy can't be doing all that badly.
Analysts expect FedEx to earn $1.52 a share for the quarter, a healthy 27% improvement over last year's showing.
Sept. 23
Few take terrestrial radio giant Clear Channel (OTC: CCMO) seriously when it comes to online streaming, but that may change in three weeks.
Clear Channel is hosting a two-day music festival -- bringing some of the industry's biggest recording stars including Jay-Z, Coldplay, and Lady Gaga to Las Vegas -- to introduce the updated iHeartRadio app.
Clear Channel's existing app is already pretty popular. It offers smartphone owners free streaming access to 750 different radio stations from all over the country. However, Pandora
"The new version is everything you want in one place," Ryan Seacrest teased during July's festival announcement.
"Real radio stations from cities across the country, and coming soon custom radio like Pandora but with more songs, more control, and no commercials through the end of the year."
Commercial-free streams from terrestrial radio? Things are about to get interesting here.
What will you be looking forward to this month? Share your thoughts in the comments box below.