A barrage of tariff threats from President Trump didn't keep investors from driving stocks to fresh records this past week. The coming earnings season could make the trade war harder to ignore.

Strong corporate profits have helped the S&P 500 rebound from the depths of April's turmoil to a gain of 6.4% this year. The broad index notched fresh records in recent days even as the White House threatened tariffs on goods from a host of trade partners, including Brazil and Canada.

Now, the coming reports pose a fresh test. Investors are seeking clarity from corporate leaders about how the back-and-forth on trade has affected their businesses, worried it will hurt economic growth and corporate profits when stocks already look expensive relative to history.

"It's hard not to think that there hasn't been some head-in-the-sand type of euphoria in the markets," said Marta Norton, chief investment strategist at financial-services firm Empower. "My concern is that maybe there's more to it than people think."

In the week ahead, investors will parse results from banks including JPMorgan Chase, Wells Fargo and Citigroup. BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, also reports earnings.

Analysts expect profits from companies in the S&P 500 to climb 4.8% in the second quarter, according to FactSet. That would mark the lowest year-over-year growth since 2023, and a steep drop from the 13% jump during the first three months of this year.

Just as important, analysts will study earnings and executive commentary for clues on the health of U.S. consumers and their ability to weather tariff-related price increases. Economists at Goldman Sachs estimate consumers will absorb 70% of the direct costs from tariffs.

Many U.S. companies last quarter pulled or lowered their outlook for the rest of the year, with some saying that the tariff whiplash leaves the future more uncertain than usual. Some analysts say they expect more doubt from corporations about their forward projections this time around.

"You'll probably start to see executive commentary get pretty creative," said Clayton Allison, portfolio manager at Prime Capital Financial.

Early reports suggest tariffs are hurting corporate balance sheets. Nike said in June that it expects tariffs to pose a gross incremental cost increase of about $1 billion. FedEx said it saw some of its largest declines in shipping across the Pacific Ocean during its most recent quarter. The package-shipping company didn't provide a full-year outlook.

ConAgra said Thursday that it expects stagnant organic sales because of factors including inflation and a weakening U.S. consumer. The Slim Jim maker projects core cost of goods to rise about 4%.

Strategists at Deutsche Bank expect that tariffs dragged down earnings growth two percentage points during the most recent quarter, and that the effect of levies on profits will grow in the second half of the year.

For the year, analysts polled by FactSet expect corporate profits to jump 8.8%. The S&P 500's communication-services sector -- which includes companies such as Alphabet and Meta Platforms, Inc. -- is expected to report the highest second-quarter growth with a roughly 30% jump from a year earlier, followed by information technology at 17%.

The S&P 500's energy sector, battered this year by a decline in crude prices, is expected to see the biggest decline, with a 26% slide in profit.

Some investors are looking for signs that the "Magnificent Seven" tech stocks -- Alphabet, Meta, Amazon.com, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla -- are continuing to funnel cash into artificial intelligence, which Wall Street considers key to maintaining their lofty valuations. Several said that solid reports and confident outlooks from the index heavyweights, whose earnings kick off July 23 with results from Tesla, could provide another leg up for the stock rally.

Improving profits would also help alleviate one major concern about stocks' climb: that it has stretched share prices relative to corporate earnings. Companies in the S&P 500 recently traded at 22.4 times their expected earnings over the next 12 months, above the 10-year average of 18.8 times.

"I would be more comfortable if valuations were a little bit closer to a normalized environment, rather than at the peak that they're at today," said Empower's Norton.