Intel Crashed 29% This Week: What Retail Traders Expect Next

Let's talk about earnings season, which has been less of a season and more of a crime scene. $INTC fell 29% on a weak sales forecast, its worst single day in roughly four decades, according to Bloomberg Podcasts. And it didn't fall alone. $GOOGL and $AMZN also slid on disappointing results and, more tellingly, on investor anxiety about whether AI capital expenditures are ever going to pay off. Spoiler: the market is starting to seriously doubt it.

The Bloomberg Podcasts crew flagged the core problem clearly: hyperscalers are pouring billions into AI infrastructure, but the revenue payoff remains fuzzy. That's the kind of uncertainty that makes institutional money nervous and retail traders either very brave or very foolish, depending on who you ask. The Nasdaq dropped 3.5% in a single session, with semiconductors down 6.2% on Friday alone, per Brian Shannon's weekly breakdown on YouTube. His read: lower highs, lower lows, and prices below the 20, 50, and 200-day moving averages. That's not a dip. That's a downtrend.

Meanwhile, the macro backdrop is not doing earnings any favors. The VIX spiked 12.91% on October 30, closing at 19.42. The 10-year Treasury is hovering around 4.93-5.05%, the Fed's St. Louis branch is calling for tighter policy, and tankers are literally on fire in the Strait of Hormuz. Earnings beats that would have ripped stocks higher six months ago are now getting sold into. The bar got lower and companies still can't clear it cleanly.

So what are retail traders actually thinking? Sentiment on YouTube and X is split in a genuinely interesting way. The doom crowd (led by channels like jeremiah babe) is in full grid-down prepper mode, which is a sentiment signal in itself. But the more data-driven voices are asking a sharper question: if $GOOGL and $AMZN can't rally on earnings in a world where everyone is betting on AI, what exactly is the bull case for the rest of tech this quarter?

Will Danoff of Fidelity Contrafund put it best in a Morningstar interview this week: stocks follow earnings, full stop. EPS and price are highly correlated over time. Right now, the EPS trajectory for big tech is getting murkier, not clearer, and the multiple compression that comes with geopolitical chaos and sticky rates is a nasty combination. The traders who are buying Intel here are betting on a mean reversion. The traders sitting on their hands are betting the mean is lower than anyone thinks.

Either way, the next two weeks of earnings reports just became the most important sentiment test of the quarter, and the market is walking in with a bruise already forming.