Alphabet -10% after hours on a SpaceX mark; Fed holds 10-2; GDP 8:30

Alphabet fell about 10% after hours on Wednesday after a quarter in which revenue rose 25% and Google Cloud more than doubled, but an $8.7 billion loss on its SpaceX stake dragged earnings per share to $2.12 against a $3.02 consensus, capital spending reached $51.4 billion in a single quarter, and free cash flow went negative, while Microsoft rose about 3% after hours on Azure growth of 48%. That split, the same money question answered two ways, has Nasdaq-100 futures down about 1.1% this morning, a few hours after the Fed held rates at 3.75% to 4.00% in a 10-2 vote with both dissenters wanting a hike, and ahead of third-quarter GDP and September PCE at 8:30 a.m. ET and Amazon’s report after the close.

Wednesday: the Fed held, the chips and Oracle carried the tape

The S&P 500 rose 0.3% to 7,743.98, the Nasdaq-100 0.5% to 29,813.16 and the Dow about 0.2% to 52,475.10, per Saxo, with the Nasdaq Composite up 0.3% per AP. In our 100, the S&P 500 fund SPY rose 0.34% to $772.31, the Nasdaq-100 fund QQQ 0.60% to $725.61, the small-cap fund IWM 0.40% to $281.29 and the Dow fund DIA 0.27% to $524.68; the gold fund GLD rose 0.33% to $373.51, and the long-bond fund TLT fell 0.78% to $80.99 from $81.63 as yields rose after the decision. 54 of the 100 stocks and funds we track rose. 46 fell. The technology fund XLK rose 0.80%, the financials fund XLF 0.45%, the energy fund XLE 0.35% and the health-care fund XLV 0.30%, while the consumer-discretionary fund XLY slipped 0.10%.

The Fed left the target range at 3.75% to 4.00%, as priced, but the vote was 10-2, with Governor Lisa Cook and Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack both preferring a quarter-point hike, per CNBC and Yahoo Finance. The statement said inflation “remains elevated”; the latest reading was 3.7% in September, up from 3.4% in August, per NBC News. Chair Kevin Warsh said activity is expanding strongly while inflation stays high, said the midterm elections played no role in the decision, and announced that the Fed will hold fewer rate-setting meetings starting next year, per Yahoo Finance and CNBC. CME FedWatch put the odds of a quarter-point hike at the December 9 meeting at about 85% after the announcement, per CNBC and Real Estate News. The 10-year Treasury yield rose about 3 basis points to 5.02% and briefly touched about 5.04%, the 30-year sat near 5.35% and the 2-year was little changed near 4.7%, per CNBC and AP.

The day’s gains did not come from the megacaps. Apple (AAPL) fell 0.94% to $343.83, Meta (META) 1.24% to $612.49, still below its $625 offering price, Nvidia (NVDA) 1.17% to $215.38 on 92.5 million shares, Tesla (TSLA) 0.80% to $404.22, and Microsoft (MSFT) slipped 0.06% to $531.01 into its report, while Alphabet (GOOGL) rose 1.34% to $324.89 before the bell rang on its quarter. What carried the index was Oracle (ORCL), up 10.73% to $144.54 from $130.53 on 81.4 million shares, and the memory chain: Micron (MU) rose 5.86% to $983.23 from $928.76, Applied Materials (AMAT) 5.07% to $416.00 from $395.93, Arm (ARM) 4.10% to $235.90, AMD (AMD) 3.24% to $578.44, Broadcom (AVGO) 2.77% to $351.81 and Intel (INTC) 1.91% to $95.53 on 81.9 million shares, its third gain in a row. The banks rose into the decision and stayed there: BlackRock (BLK) 1.92%, Morgan Stanley (MS) 1.72%, American Express (AXP) 1.61%, Goldman Sachs (GS) 1.47% to $925.17, Wells Fargo (WFC) 1.22%, Citigroup (C) 1.16% and JPMorgan (JPM) 1.05%. Boeing (BA) fell a further 0.62% to $167.14 after Tuesday’s 10.69% drop. Caterpillar (CAT) opened at $730.00 and closed flat at $713.38 ahead of its report this morning.

Alphabet: a revenue beat, a SpaceX mark, and $51 billion of capex in one quarter

The operating numbers were not the problem. Per the 8-K filed with the SEC, revenue rose 25% to $127.6 billion, against a consensus of about $127.2 billion per Investing.com; Google Search and other rose 12% to $63.35 billion; YouTube ads rose to $11.2 billion from $10.3 billion; Google Cloud revenue rose 103% to $30.7 billion, which the release calls record growth; operating income rose 30% to $40.6 billion for a 31.8% margin. Below the operating line, other income swung to a loss of $8.2 billion from a gain of $12.8 billion a year earlier, driven by an $8.7 billion loss on equity securities, which CFO Anat Ashkenazi attributed primarily to an unrealized loss on the company’s SpaceX investment, per the call transcript on Investing.com; interest expense rose to $967 million from $143 million. Net income was $26.5 billion and diluted EPS $2.12, down from $2.87 a year earlier, against the $3.02 consensus. The company’s own figure is that the mark cost $0.55 of EPS, so even without it the quarter would have landed near $2.67, still short.

What the after-hours selling is about is the cash. Purchases of property and equipment were $51.4 billion in the quarter, against $24.0 billion a year earlier, and Saxo puts free cash flow for the quarter at a negative $9.07 billion. Management kept its 2026 capex guidance at $195 billion to $205 billion and said capex will “increase significantly in 2027,” per Investing.com. On the fourth quarter, Ashkenazi flagged a larger foreign-exchange headwind in Search and YouTube and said lapping last year’s Search acceleration will cost a couple of points of growth. The extended-hours feed had the stock at $292.50, about 10% below its $324.89 close, on 4.2 million after-hours shares; Investing.com’s count, off a $322.22 close, was a fall of 10.42% to $288.35. Our feed’s close takes precedence, so the move stays at about 10%. It is the largest after-hours fall for a megacap this earnings season, and it comes with the stock having risen 1.34% in the session on the OpenAI TPU report, so the whole gap is the quarter.

Microsoft and Meta: the other two reports

Microsoft (MSFT) is the opposite shape. Revenue rose 19% to $92.28 billion against a $90.69 billion consensus, adjusted EPS was $4.89 against $4.73, and Azure revenue rose more than 48% to $33.17 billion against $32.32 billion expected, per SiliconANGLE; the new Agents and Infra segment grew 25% to $76.8 billion. Capital expenditures including finance leases were $45.2 billion, up about 30% from a year earlier but under the roughly $50.7 billion analysts had modeled, and free cash flow fell 27% to $18.63 billion. The guide for the December quarter is $96 billion to $97.1 billion of revenue against $95.6 billion expected, with Azure growth of 49% to 50% in constant currency against a 45.1% forecast. The extended-hours feed had the stock at $546.30, up about 3% from its $531.01 close, on 1.8 million shares; SiliconANGLE and CNBC put the move between 3% and 4%. Read next to Alphabet, the market’s rule is simple enough: a cloud number that beats and a capex number that does not run ahead of it gets paid; the reverse gets sold.

Meta (META) reported record revenue of $64.0 billion against $63.3 billion expected, up from $51.2 billion a year earlier, and GAAP EPS of $3.83 against $3.56, which the company said would have been $7.40 without the legal charge from the teen mental-health settlement, per Yahoo Finance’s live blog. It narrowed 2026 capex guidance to $135 billion to $145 billion from $130 billion to $145 billion, raising the floor, and announced a 2-for-1 split structured as a distribution of non-voting Class C shares that begin trading in late January 2027. Yahoo Finance had the stock up more than 3% after the report and down 0.5% in early Thursday premarket trading; the extended-hours feed printed only $616.04 on about 2,000 shares, so the after-hours move for Meta is thinner evidence than the other two.

Oracle’s investor day, SK hynix’s echo, and ServiceNow after the bell

Oracle’s 10.73% was its investor day, plus a set of partnership announcements. Per TipRanks and GuruFocus, the company told investors it will limit additional capital-markets financing to $20 billion through fiscal 2030, forecast fiscal 2030 revenue of $225 billion or more, and said free cash flow turns positive in the second half of fiscal 2028 and reaches at least $30 billion in fiscal 2029, when it projects capital spending to decline; it also announced AI partnerships with OpenAI, Nvidia, Intel, Cerebras and Google, and said it will be the first hyperscale cloud outside Google to host Google’s TPUs, from 2027. The stock had lost more than half its value from its September 2025 record to a July low near $115, per GuruFocus, on exactly the financing worry the day addressed. The after-hours feed had it at $141.05, so about $3.50 of the gain was given back once Alphabet’s numbers were out. Put the three together and Wednesday’s question was never whether AI spending is big; it was when each company says the spending starts paying for itself, and the stocks sorted on the answer.

The memory names were an echo of SK hynix, which reported a record 83.33 trillion won of operating profit on Tuesday night and said memory demand exceeds supply through 2030, per Benzinga and 24/7 Wall St.; Micron’s 5.86% and Applied Materials’ 5.07% followed, with Nvidia the exception, down 1.17%. Software split. ServiceNow (NOW) fell 3.00% to $150.13 from $154.78 in the session, then reported third-quarter revenue of $4.11 billion, up 20.5% and just above the $4.10 billion estimate, with adjusted EPS of $1.00 against $1.02, and a quarterly subscription outlook that matched estimates, per Bloomberg and AskTraders; Bloomberg’s read is that an in-line guide did nothing to ease the worry that AI erodes the software model, and the extended-hours feed had the stock at $122.97, about 18% below its close, on 1.7 million shares. Robinhood (HOOD) fell 3.31% to $91.43 from $94.56 in its first session after Tuesday night’s report, where crypto revenue fell 55%; Spotify (SPOT) fell 3.07% to $538.40 from $555.45, which TradingKey attributes to profit-taking after its post-earnings run; Cloudflare (NET) fell 2.77% to $318.72, Roblox (RBLX) 2.18% and Palo Alto Networks (PANW) 1.79%, none with a same-day headline we could confirm, while Adobe (ADBE) rose 0.56%, Salesforce (CRM) 0.51%, MongoDB (MDB) 0.92% and Snowflake (SNOW) 0.74%. In the movers feed, Icon (ICLR) rose 16.97% to $214.02, Evercore (EVR) 12.61% to $292.65, Brinker (EAT) 12.12% to $220.57, Wendy’s (WEN) 15.16% to $7.07 on 34.8 million shares, AxoGen (AXGN) 31.35% and OrthoPediatrics (KIDS) 29.79%, none with a story we confirmed, so they stay as data. Boston Scientific fell about 9% after cutting its sales outlook following a cyberattack, per Saxo.

Overnight: Samsung’s turn, Kospi lower, futures down

Samsung Electronics published its full third-quarter report and the stock fell, down 5.4% per AP and more than 4% per TradingKey, despite strong results, because its shareholder-return plan disappointed; SK hynix rose 1.6% after Wednesday’s 10.9%. The Kospi was down about 1.2% near 5,938 late in the session per TradingKey, after AP’s earlier reading of a 2.2% fall to 5,880.25, a day after it closed above 6,000. The Nikkei 225 rose 1.1% to 64,659.25, a fourth straight gain, per TradingKey. The Hang Seng was flat at 23,101.86, the Shanghai Composite fell 0.9% to 3,647.12, Taiwan’s Taiex fell 1.9% and Australia’s ASX 200 rose 0.5% to 8,888.50, per AP. In Europe on Wednesday the Stoxx 600 rose 0.07% to 644.14, the DAX 0.44% to 25,704.02 and the FTSE 100 0.07% to 10,694.50, per Saxo, with Stellantis up 15% on better-than-expected revenue, Unilever down as much as 3.2%, and UK banks higher after the Autumn Budget raised the bank surcharge by 3 points to 6%, less than feared.

US futures at about 3:50 a.m. ET: Nasdaq-100 futures down 1.14%, S&P 500 futures down 0.32%, Dow futures up 0.44% and Russell 2000 futures up 0.62%, per Yahoo Finance and Stocktwits; CNBC’s reading had Nasdaq-100 futures down more than 1%. The 10-year yield eased to just below 5.00% overnight and the 2-year was at 4.68%, per AP. Brent crude was down 1.2% at $110.32 and WTI down 1.3% at $101.46; the dollar was at 157.72 yen and the euro at $1.1146, per AP. Spot gold was near $4,067, per Saxo. The extended-hours feed had Amazon (AMZN) at $253.82 against a $254.60 close, flat into its report, and Nvidia (NVDA) at $213.86.

What to watch today

8:30 a.m. ET, three releases at once: the advance estimate of third-quarter GDP, consensus 3.0% to 3.2% annualized against 2.2% in the second quarter; September personal income and spending with the PCE price index, core consensus 0.3% on the month against 0.2% in August; and initial jobless claims, consensus 198,000 against 194,000 last week, per Investing.com and the BEA schedule. The PCE print is the first inflation data since the Fed’s statement called inflation elevated.
The ECB at 9:15 a.m. ET, press conference at 9:45. The deposit rate is 2.50% after September’s hike, and a hold is the consensus: 70 of 73 economists in a Reuters poll expected no change, with 64 expecting a quarter-point rise in December, per the previews. The Bank of Japan decides Friday.
Before the open: Mastercard (MA), consensus $5.16 a share, and Merck (MRK), consensus $2.20, per Digrin; Caterpillar (CAT), per Saxo.
After the close: Amazon (AMZN), consensus $1.96 a share on about $202.28 billion of revenue, with AWS growth expected at 37.8% per FactSet via Benzinga; Intel (INTC) is also on Saxo’s list for today, and Reddit (RDDT) on Investrade’s.
Also today: natural-gas storage at 10:30 a.m. and a 7-year note auction at 1:00 p.m. ET, per Investing.com; China’s plenum concludes.
The opens: Alphabet on its 10% after-hours fall and Microsoft on its 3% gain; ServiceNow after its 18% after-hours drop; Meta on the thin after-hours read; Oracle after its 10.73% day and the after-hours giveback; the memory names after Samsung’s fall; the long bond after TLT’s 0.78% loss and a 10-year that closed above 5%.

Not financial advice. iTrading Buddy summarizes publicly available market data and news; every figure above is sourced from the reporting available before the US open on the date shown. Verify anything you act on.