Stock Market Morning Brief: Oct 30, 2026

Nasdaq one hundred futures are down about two and a half percent this morning, and the reason is three letters: A, I. Amazon and Intel reported last night, and investors did not like what they saw.

How bad are we talking?

Intel's down about twenty-five percent in premarket trading. Amazon down six to seven percent. And that's on top of Thursday, when Alphabet fell twelve percent and wiped out roughly five hundred billion dollars in market value.

Five hundred billion in a day. That's Google. That's not a meme stock.

Reuters called it a stunning number, and it was Alphabet's worst day in over twenty years. The trigger wasn't a scandal. It was the cash flow line.

Meaning they're spending more than they're bringing in?

Free cash flow went negative, just over nine billion dollars for the quarter. Capital spending guidance stayed at a hundred and ninety-five to two hundred and five billion for the year. And Amazon's free cash flow was negative forty-two point four billion.

Negative forty-two billion? At Amazon? That's the company everyone thinks prints money.

Its cloud business, AWS, actually grew at the fastest pace in five years. Investors looked past it and stared at the data center bill.

So what's actually changed? They've been spending like this all year and nobody blinked.

What changed is the question the market's asking. For two years it was "who's building?" Now it's "when does the building pay for itself?" And nobody's answering with a date.

Intel's not really an AI story though, is it?

It's not. Intel's problem is PCs. Weak fourth quarter guidance, continued softness, and a memory chip crunch. Their client computing and physical AI unit did eight point one billion, down five percent from a year ago.

So one company's spending too much and the other's selling too little, and both stocks get hammered on the same morning.

Which is why the whole chip complex is dragging. AMD down eight percent premarket, Nvidia and Broadcom each off around three.

Is anything actually going up today?

Dow futures, oddly. Up about seventy points, with Procter and Gamble and Coca-Cola both up two percent. There's not much big tech in the Dow, so it's holding.

Soap and soda beating semiconductors. That's a sentence.

And bonds. US Treasuries are headed for their biggest monthly gain in nearly three years. The ten-year yield fell about eight basis points today to four point nine one percent.

Hang on, why do bond prices go up when stocks go down?

Money moves to where it feels safe. When investors doubt the stock story, they buy government debt instead, prices rise, and yields fall. Yen and Swiss franc strengthened for the same reason.

And the Fed just sat on its hands Wednesday, right?

Held steady, three point seven five to four percent, after hiking a quarter point in September. The statement said inflation "remains elevated" and they're waiting for more information. Futures still lean toward a hike at the December ninth meeting.

A hike. Not a cut. That still sounds backwards to me.

Oil is why. West Texas crude is up around two percent today to roughly a hundred and four dollars, Brent near a hundred and thirteen. WTI is up about fifteen percent just this month.

Because of the war with Iran?

A tanker was attacked going through the Strait of Hormuz, and Ukraine hit a refinery in Russia. Expensive energy feeds inflation, and that's what keeps rate hikes on the table.

Okay. You mentioned crypto earlier and then dropped it, which I noticed.

Binance was hacked. Six point three billion dollars in assets affected. It's the biggest crypto hack ever recorded.

Six point three... the previous record was what, a billion and a half?

The ByBit hack in twenty twenty-five, one point five billion, which the FBI attributed to North Korea. Co-CEO Richard Teng says an initial investigation points to a compromised DevOps engineer's laptop.

One laptop. Six billion dollars.

He also said, quote, "your money is safe, and we're covering every loss." Binance has frozen three billion, Tether froze one point five six billion, Circle eight hundred million.

Is anyone saying who did it?

Nobody official. There's widespread speculation it's state-backed, with fingers pointed at North Korea, but Teng hasn't attributed it to anyone. Bitcoin hit a six-week low, then trimmed losses to about seventy-seven thousand four hundred dollars.

So what do I actually watch next week?

The US midterms on Tuesday, November third. Reuters reported growing bets Democrats take Congress. And December ninth is the Fed. Those are the two dates that move things.

And the AI question just... stays open.

Anthropic filed to go public on Monday. If that IPO prices well, the mood changes fast. If it doesn't, this week stops looking like a wobble.

Great Halloween, everyone.