Earnings Season Meets a War Zone: Retail Traders Are Betting on Oil Plays While Tech Burns
With Hormuz deconflicted and tech selling off, retail sentiment is pivoting hard ahead of Q2 earnings reports
Ticker Ratings
Welcome to the most geopolitically spiced earnings setup in recent memory. $GOOGL dropped as much as 7.2% in its biggest intraday slide since February after Nobel Prize-winning DeepMind VP John Jumper walked out the door and straight into Anthropic's arms. That's two elite AI researchers gone in short order, and retail traders on Reddit and X are starting to ask a genuinely uncomfortable question: is Google's AI moat leaking?
Meanwhile, $SPXL energy bulls are doing victory laps. A 60-day US-Iran ceasefire, IAEA inspection agreements, and 20-30 million newly unlocked barrels flooding out of the Persian Gulf sent oil down nearly 3% — a tailwind for consumer names heading into Q2 but a gut-punch for anyone who loaded up on crude plays last week. Morgan Stanley's Andrew Slimmon called the AI selloff "healthy" in a CNBC appearance, arguing momentum tourists — not true believers — are getting flushed out. The earnings data will tell us who's right.
Nouriel Roubini, the man who once predicted the 2008 crash, is now calling himself "Dr. Boom" and projecting US GDP growth hitting 4% by decade's end on AI productivity gains. Either earnings season confirms that thesis — or it buries it.