Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon: Retail Bulls Load Up Before Earnings
With oil at $117, VIX jumping 14%, and a war rattling the Middle East, retail traders are still betting Big Tech delivers. Here's what the sentiment data says.
Ticker Ratings
If you told most people the VIX just spiked 14%, Brent crude topped $117 a barrel, and the U.S. may be gearing up for another military strike on Iran, they'd probably hide under their bed. Retail traders on YouTube and X looked at that same data and said: great time to buy Alphabet.
Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Mandep Singh, featured in Bloomberg's Daybreak Weekend podcast, came out explicitly bullish on $GOOGL, $MSFT, and $AMZN heading into earnings, citing accelerating cloud revenue as the core thesis. And social sentiment broadly agrees. Despite the NASDAQ dropping 2.6% on October 22 and semiconductors getting absolutely cooked (down 13.5% for the month per Brian Shannon's weekly analysis), megacap cloud names are somehow holding their hype cycle intact.
The bull case is pretty clean: cloud spend from enterprises isn't slowing down, AI infrastructure demand is what Blackstone President John Gray called "almost parabolic," and all three companies have meaningful exposure to that buildout. $AMZN's AWS and $MSFT's Azure are the two biggest landlords in AI compute, and $GOOGL's Google Cloud has been closing the gap faster than the market has priced in. If capital keeps flowing into AI at the pace Blackstone, Apollo, and OpenAI's $1.25 trillion valuation round suggest, these three eat first.
The bear case is harder to dismiss right now though. Ten-year Treasury yields are sitting at 4.96% after briefly touching 5.09% earlier this week, which is a genuine gravitational pull on high-multiple tech stocks. The Fed is expected to hold rates at its next meeting, but Bloomberg's own coverage flagged dissent from officials like Beth Hammock and Lori Logan as headline and core PCE inflation trends worsen. That's not a greenlight. Hedge fund short leverage has also surged to the 99th percentile of five-year historical readings according to Goldman Sachs data flagged on Seeking Alpha, meaning the setup for a squeeze is real, but so is the setup for a flush if earnings disappoint even slightly.
Retail sentiment is leaning long and leaning loud. Whether the actual numbers validate that confidence or hand the shorts their best week of the year is something you'll find out before the weekend. Place your bets accordingly, and maybe keep one eye on oil.