Which Stocks to Buy Now: October 29, 2026

If you want the short version of what analysts are telling clients this morning, Thursday the twenty-ninth of October: buy Microsoft, buy Palantir, buy Marvell, buy Apple. And sell, or at least step back from, Alphabet.

Alphabet? Google? That's the one everyone owns. What happened?

Third-quarter earnings landed, and they missed. Core search revenue came in at about sixty-three point four billion dollars against an expected sixty-five. And free cash flow was NEGATIVE nine billion.

Negative? Google? That company prints money in its sleep.

It's the AI buildout. They're spending hundreds of billions on data centers, and this quarter the spending outran the cash coming in. The stock dropped eleven percent premarket.

So everyone downgrades it, presumably.

Not everyone, and that's the interesting split. Citizens cut it to market perform, saying search growth slowed about five points from the second quarter to the third. JPMorgan kept it at overweight, basically saying this shows how little margin for error a hyperscaler has right now.

Same numbers, opposite calls. Very reassuring.

Meanwhile Microsoft went the other way. Revenue about ninety-two billion, ahead of expectations, and Azure grew forty-eight percent year on year. Bank of America reiterated buy and raised its target to six hundred and thirty dollars a share.

Forty-eight percent on a business that size is genuinely hard to picture.

And guidance for next quarter was forty-nine to fifty percent, against a street expecting forty-five. That's why the stock was up two percent before the open while Alphabet was down eleven.

So the market's not anti-AI-spending. It's anti-spending-without-the-receipts.

That's the line running through almost every call today. ServiceNow fell twenty percent on a two-cent earnings miss, and Goldman still said buy, but with a condition: they want evidence ServiceNow can turn its role in the AI stack into actual revenue growth.

A twenty percent drop on two cents? That can't just be the miss.

It's the guidance. Subscription revenue for the fourth quarter guided to a range right around where analysts already were. No upside. In this market, in-line reads as disappointing.

Brutal crowd.

The big new rating today is JPMorgan starting coverage of Palantir at overweight, and putting it on their focus list. Their target is two hundred sixty-two dollars by December twenty twenty-seven, which they say implies over thirty percent upside.

Palantir's been the stock people argue about for years. Is anyone saying it's expensive?

Plenty do, but not in what I have in front of me today. What I can tell you is Palantir also sits fifth on Tradestie's daily top fifty screen, which ranks large caps on earnings growth, revenue growth and relative strength.

Hang on. What's at number one, then?

Want to guess? It's not a chip company.

Not a chip company... a bank? Something boring and profitable?

Oil tankers. The top spot is Okeanis Eco Tankers, and numbers two, three, six, nine and ten are also tanker and shipping companies. Frontline, Torm, DHT, Hafnia, International Seaways.

Six of the top ten are boats? While everyone's talking about artificial intelligence?

Shipping rates have been strong, and that screen is purely mechanical. It doesn't have opinions, it just scores momentum and profitability. Micron also jumped twelve places to number seven, and AMD climbed twenty-one spots.

Okay, but a computer liking a stock and a human analyst liking it are different things.

Completely different, and worth holding apart. The human calls today lean elsewhere. Marvell was initiated at buy by SPDB International with a three hundred and three dollar target, and the consensus on Marvell is strong buy: twenty-four of twenty-six firms bullish.

Though Marvell also dropped eleven percent this morning, didn't it? I saw something about a deal.

Bloomberg reported it's in talks to buy Lumentum, the data center optics maker, possibly announced next week. Lumentum jumped five percent, Marvell fell. That's the usual acquirer-gets-punished reaction.

What about the names normal people actually hold? Apple, Boeing?

Goldman reiterated Apple as buy on the new MacBook, iMac and iPad models with the M-six chips. Monness Crespi and Hardt also reiterated buy on Wednesday, with a three hundred fifty-five dollar target. Modest, against a stock around three forty-four.

So they like it but barely.

Boeing's the messier one. Langenberg upgraded it to buy on Wednesday, right after Boeing cut its delivery target and the stock fell nearly ten percent on the twenty-seventh. But on the twenty-eighth, BNP, Barclays and Wells Fargo all cut their targets.

Upgraded into a selloff while three other firms mark it down. That's just a disagreement about whether the bad news is finished.

Which is where it stands going into tomorrow, the last trading day but one in October. Apple and Amazon style reports keep coming, and the thing to watch is whether the AI spenders can show cash coming back out.

And none of this is advice, I assume.

None of it. These are what analysts are saying, not what you should do. Half of them will be revising it by Monday anyway.