Mixed Signals Ahead

Alphabet and Tesla kick off Big Tech earnings with mixed results.

Author

Josh Banuelos
July 23, 2026

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Market Snapshot

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Market News

Report Cards & Rocket Fuel

Wednesday's session was quiet as investors stayed on the sidelines ahead of key events.

  • The S&P dropped 0.14% to 7,498.96.

  • The Nasdaq lost 0.57% to 25,690.90.

  • The Dow fell 6.06 points, that's -0.01%, or as statisticians call it, "nothing."

Chips handed back a slice of Tuesday's 5%+ semi rally as traders de-risked ahead of the main event: the first two Mag 7 earnings reports of the season.

The only desks with a pulse were in energy.

  • Brent jumped 3.4% to settle at $94.07, briefly reaching $95 and marking a five-week high.

  • WTI closed at $86.83 as U.S. strikes on Iran rolled into an 11th straight round.

    Rubio said American forces would keep protecting shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, a body of water that carries roughly a fifth of the world's oil and approximately all of its geopolitical anxiety.

Why should equity apes care about crude? Because $94 oil is inflation with a fuse. Energy bleeds into freight, plastics, airfares, and your 2 a.m. DoorDash, and traders are starting to whisper the two least sexy words in finance: rate hike.

Stack on the tariffs, 50% duties already hitting Canadian goods, plus a plan to make the expiring 10% global tariffs permanent (with a floated 100% on imported generic drugs), and the Fed's "inflation is yesterday's problem" arc is suddenly getting a rewrite.

Then the bell rang, and the report cards dropped.

Alphabet did Alphabet things: a beat on both the top and bottom line, with Google Cloud revenue up 82% YoY, accelerating from last quarter's 63% and handing AI bulls the monetization receipt they've been begging for. The question that's dogged the stock all year, whether $180–190B of 2026 capex ever pays for itself, just got its most convincing answer yet.

Tesla, meanwhile, turned in a report card only a mother could love:

  • Revenue jumped 26% to $28.24B on a record ~480K deliveries, a legit beat.

  • Adjusted EPS of $0.33 badly missed the ~$0.50 the Street wanted.

  • Free cash flow turned negative, falling to -$1.1 billion, as capital spending more than doubled to $5.79 billion to fund projects including Optimus, Cybercab, robotaxis, and AI infrastructure. Shares fell about 3% in after-hours trading.

The bigger takeaway is that demand for AI remains strong. Supermicro's more than $60 billion in new orders, and GE Vernova's 88% order growth both reinforced that trend. At the same time, companies are spending heavily to keep up with AI demand.

IBM, ServiceNow, and Texas Instruments also reported earnings after the close, with Intel next in line, setting up another busy stretch for investors.

Peel Take: The AI trade's problem was never demand; it's who's paying the tab, and with what. Alphabet funds its buildout with an ads printer that runs hot 24/7; Tesla is funding humanoid robots with negative free cash flow at a ~300x multiple. Both can be right about the future, but only one gets graded on faith. And with crude at $94, the macro conversation is quietly drifting from "when's the next cut?" to "please, no hikes,” that repricing, not any single earnings print, is the real tail risk to every long-duration AI dream stock in your portfolio.

What's Ripe

Super Micro Computer (SMCI) 19.8%

  • The AI server slinger pre-announced fiscal Q4 and casually mentioned it booked over $60B in new orders in a single quarter, roughly triple its own market cap and more than five times what it'll actually bill this quarter, pushing total backlog to a record.

  • The real shocker was margins, as the guidance of 15-17% vs. a prior 8.2-8.4%, i.e., nearly double, on a favorable customer and product mix.

  • Peel Take: The margin bears got cooked in broad daylight. When a company pre-announces $60B in orders against a $~20B market cap, you either buy the shovel-seller or spend the next year explaining why you didn’t. Just remember the fine print: backlog is a promise, revenue is a fact, and between the two sit a $7B dilution package and a governance file thicker than the order book.

Dell Technologies (DELL) 9.3%

  • Nothing makes your backlog look sexier than your rival's blowout. Dell rode the Supermicro read-through to $441 as analysts, Evercore ISI included, jacked up price targets on AI server demand.

  • The receipts are real as the AI-optimized server revenue hit $16.1B last quarter, up 757% YoY, with a $51.3B AI backlog spread across 5,000+ customers.

  • Peel Take: Michael Dell started this company in a dorm room selling beige boxes; four decades later, he's selling picks and shovels in the biggest gold rush since the internet, and the Street cannot get enough. The catch: hardware is a knife fight with single-digit margins, and at these levels Dell is priced to win every knife fight between now and 2030.

What's Rotten

GE Vernova (GEV) 8.7%

  • The turbine titan posted Q2 EPS of $2.47 vs. the ~$3.18 Wall Street expected, a genuine whiff, even as revenue beat at $11.1B, up 21.9% YoY.

  • The demand remains borderline absurd as the orders are up 88% to $24.2B, backlog at $176B (management sees $200B by 2027), $5B+ of first-half data center orders, and 2026 guidance raised to $45.5–46.5B in revenue with $11.5–12.5B of free cash flow.

  • Peel Take: This is what happens when a stock quadruples on the "AI needs electrons" trade and then shows up with a bottom-line miss; perfection was priced in at $1,078, and $2.47 ain't perfect. The long-term thesis is fully intact: every data center needs a power plant, and GEV sells the power plants.

Reddit (RDDT) 8.3%

  • A report dropped claiming Reddit has internally discussed blocking Google's access to its content, the corporate equivalent of threatening to move out of your rent-free apartment.

  • The shares ripped in June on hopes Reddit would flip its Google licensing deal from a flat fee to usage-based pricing. Wednesday's read was darker: if you're threatening to walk, you probably don't have the leverage, and it reignited worries about how much of Reddit's traffic flows through Google's front door.

  • Peel Take: Reddit's data is genuinely the good stuff. Two decades of humans arguing in public is exactly the corpus LLMs crave. But Google isn't just a licensing customer; it's the firehose that delivers Reddit its users. Threatening the guy who drives you to work is certainly a negotiating strategy.

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If Jake loses 8 pounds, he will weigh twice as much as his sister. Together they now weigh 278 pounds. What is Jake’s present weight, in pounds?

Answer: 188

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Jackie has two solutions that are 2 percent sulfuric acid and 12 percent sulfuric acid by volume, respectively. If these solutions are mixed in appropriate quantities to produce 60 liters of a solution that is 5 percent sulfuric acid, approximately how many liters of the 2 percent solution will be required?

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