Amazon and Intel forecasts deepen tech losses
Amazon shares fell nearly 7% before the opening bell. Its fiscal third-quarter results missed Wall Street's expectations, and the company issued a cautious fourth-quarter sales forecast covering the crucial holiday shopping season.
Intel suffered a steeper premarket decline of more than 25%. With the personal computer market still weak, the chipmaker projected fourth-quarter revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion and adjusted earnings of 25 cents a share. Analysts had anticipated about $17.1 billion in revenue and earnings of 43 cents a share.
The forecast also accounts for an explosion at Intel's manufacturing plant in Israel earlier in October, according to CNBC. Two workers died and a third was seriously injured. The resulting extended shutdown disrupted shipments of 10-nanometer chips, and finance chief David Zinsner said the incident would reduce revenue by about $600 million over two quarters. He expects the PC slowdown to last at least through the first half of 2027.
Intel entered the earnings report with a roughly 150% stock gain for 2026, despite having lost about 23% in October as concerns grew about the scale of AI investment. Its third-quarter results showed divergent demand: client computing and physical AI revenue declined 5% from a year earlier to $8.1 billion, while data center and AI revenue increased 78% to $7.3 billion.
The broader AI trade has also swung between optimism about the technology and worries over constraints such as supply shortages, producing sharp reversals in chipmakers and other related stocks.
Alphabet's spending and search revenue draw scrutiny
Friday's pressure followed a historic Thursday selloff in Alphabet. The Google and YouTube parent's Class A shares lost more than 12% after summer growth fell short of analysts' forecasts. CNBC reported a 13% decline, erasing roughly $500 billion in market value. It was the stock's worst session since Google's 2004 public debut, exceeding the previous record loss of 11.63% in March 2020.
Investors had been looking for Alphabet to at least meet growth expectations as scrutiny of its AI spending intensified. Third-quarter free cash flow was negative $9.07 billion, versus the $2.7 billion analysts expected. The company nevertheless kept its full-year capital spending forecast at $195 billion to $205 billion.
Search advertising remained Alphabet's biggest revenue source, bringing in $63.35 billion in the September quarter. That was a 12% increase but still below analysts' expectations, CNBC reported. Chief business officer Philipp Schindler said lower monetization in AI Mode accounted for part of the impact. Alphabet is expanding advertising in both AI Mode and AI Overviews, including internationally.
Bitcoin falls as Binance responds to record theft
Bitcoin traded about 3% lower at $77,695 following the October 29 theft of approximately $6.36 billion from Binance. The exchange temporarily stopped both deposits and withdrawals and promised to cover all losses with company money and its Secure Asset Fund for Users, or SAFU.
According to SecurityWeek, blockchain intelligence firms TRM Labs and Chainalysis attributed the attack to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking unit also tracked as Lazarus Group/APT38. TRM expressed high confidence in that assessment. Binance has not publicly named the attackers and says it is working with law enforcement.
The theft is the largest on record in cryptocurrency, at roughly four times the previous record: the $1.5 billion stolen from Bybit in February 2025.
Binance said its preliminary investigation pointed to a possible compromise of a DevOps engineer's laptop. That may have given an attacker access to a service container from which unauthorized withdrawals were submitted. The exchange said it had found no evidence that any wallet private key had leaked.
By October 30, stablecoin issuers had frozen roughly $2.7 billion in stolen assets, according to TRM's tally. That included around 1.77 billion USDT frozen by Tether and 825 million USDC frozen by Circle. Binance put the frozen amount at about $3 billion. TRM said the attackers still controlled more than 420,000 ETH and 18,270 BTC, worth about $2.4 billion, which no issuer can freeze.
European shares mixed as oil climbs
Markets outside the U.S. were mixed. France's CAC 40 edged up 0.1% to 7,981.42 and Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.3% to 10,725.66, while Germany's DAX lost 0.6% to 25,895.24. Most Asian markets declined.
U.S. benchmark crude gained 2.1%, reaching $104.13 a barrel. International benchmark Brent rose 2.5% to $113.51. Brent was still trading toward the top of its range since the Iran war began; its most actively traded contract reached a wartime high of nearly $120 in March.
Shipping attacks continue in the Strait of Hormuz
The British military reported Friday that a tanker was temporarily disabled by a fire after a small boat placed two explosives on its hull during its passage through the Strait of Hormuz. A day earlier, Iran's Revolutionary Guard said three oil tankers had hit mines while trying to exit the strait on an unauthorized route.
UKMTO had said earlier in October that reported attacks on shipping in the strait were already at their busiest level since March. USNI News, citing the International Maritime Organization, reported 27 attacks on commercial ships so far in October, compared with 22 in March. October's count was the highest since the Iran-U.S. war began in late February.
Traffic continued despite the attacks. Lloyd's List recorded 104 vessels without Iranian links passing through the strait from October 5 through 11. That was fewer than the previous week's 126, but 31% above August's weekly average.
