QQQ Stock Leads the Search Board as Amazon and Intel Tumble After Hours on Revenue Misses
The earnings Austin's market watchers waited on all day landed after Thursday's close - and the first verdict was harsh. Amazon missed on both earnings and revenue, Intel beat on earnings but missed on revenue, and both stocks fell hard after hours on a day the Nasdaq already dropped 1.38 percent.
The searches told the story before the numbers did. On the U.S. trends listing read Thursday afternoon, 'qqq stock' - the Nasdaq-100 tracker - was the country's top search, with 'aapl stock', 'amd stock', 'sbux stock' and 'rivn stock' crowding the same board. After the close, the releases behind those searches arrived: Amazon and Intel, the two names Thursday's earnings calendar had been built around since morning.
Amazon missed on both lines. Earnings came in at $1.89 a share against expectations of $1.97, and revenue at $201.90 billion against $202.20 billion expected. The stock, which had already fallen 4.25 percent in the regular session to $243.79, dropped roughly another 6 percent after hours. Intel's report split the other way: adjusted earnings of $0.52 a share beat the $0.41 expected, but revenue of $16.50 billion came in just under the $16.60 billion consensus - and the market punished the miss anyway, sending Intel down roughly 17 to 20 percent after hours as the reaction developed.
The regular session had set the tone. The Nasdaq Composite and the Nasdaq 100 each fell 1.38 percent, the S&P 500 slipped 0.30 percent to 7,720.54 and the Dow eased 0.25 percent to 52,342.62, with Alphabet's 12.64 percent plunge to $283.82 the day's standout loss among the megacaps. Yet the selling was concentrated, not broad: 402 S&P 500 stocks advanced against 84 decliners, and the small-cap Russell 2000 rose 1.01 percent - a falling index carried by a handful of very large names, while the average stock rose.
Not every report landed badly. Gilead Sciences beat on both earnings ($2.55 against $2.19 expected) and revenue ($8.30 billion against $7.80 billion), and SanDisk beat on both lines as well, while Starbucks beat on earnings and missed narrowly on revenue. For Texas readers, the night's two headline misses are the ones with local weight: Amazon and Intel both run large Texas operations, and their after-hours slides set the opening tone for Friday - the last day of early voting and the end of a week in which growth, inflation and the Fed's hold have all been repriced at once.
