Weekly Market Commentary

The Noble Weekly Review

Week of October 26 – 30, 2026  •  Published November 2, 2026

Market Scorecard — Last Week

Gabe's Weekly Perspective

You read the headlines last week and your stomach turned. I understand. Alphabet had the worst day in its history. Intel dropped 25%. Every big technology name that reported got hit. It felt like something was breaking. Here is what nobody told you. The equal weighted S&P 500 went UP last week and closed at a brand new high on Thursday. Nine of the eleven sectors finished green. The economy grew at 3.4%. Seven companies had a bad week. The other four hundred and ninety three did just fine. That is not a market falling apart. That is a market sorting winners from spenders, and it is doing it right in front of us.

Moving Higher

Under Pressure

What Moved Markets Last Week

First, The Part Everybody Got Wrong

Three giants reported. The headlines said carnage. Let us look at what was actually in the reports, because it is not what you were told.

Microsoft beat. Azure, their cloud business, grew 48%. They spent $45.2 billion on buildout, which is LESS than the $50 billion Wall Street expected, and they cut their full year spending plan to $170 billion from $175 billion. They stayed cash flow positive the whole way. Management did exactly what investors have been demanding for months. The stock finished down 1.04%.

Read that again. A company beat, spent less, showed discipline, and still finished the week lower. That tells you something important, and we will come back to it.

What Alphabet's Report Actually Said

Now Alphabet, which I believe is the most misread report of the year.

Revenue grew 25% to $127.6 billion. That is the thirteenth consecutive quarter of double digit growth. Google Cloud did not grow. It DOUBLED, up 103% to $30.7 billion. Cloud operating income more than tripled to $11.1 billion and the margin went from 23.7% to 36.2%. A business that size growing triple digits while margins expand twelve points is close to unheard of.

And Search? Everyone's favorite worry? Up 12% to $63.3 billion, with query growth the strongest in five years. Nobody is using Google less. People are using it more than they have in half a decade. The Gemini app crossed one billion users and is now the fastest growing product in the company's history. The contracted backlog, meaning business already signed but not yet recognized, sits at $567.7 billion. Over half a trillion dollars of that is Cloud, with roughly 55% landing inside two years.

So why the worst day in company history? Earnings came in at $2.12 per share against expectations near $3.01. Free cash flow was negative $9.07 billion. Capital spending hit $51.4 billion, more than double last year. Those are real and I am not waving them away.

But ask yourself the question the market did not bother asking. Where is that money going? Into the capacity for a cloud business that just doubled, that is already profitable, that is expanding margins, and that has half a trillion dollars of customers under contract waiting to be served. If you owned a store and told me you were borrowing to build a second warehouse because you had more orders than shelf space, I would not call that trouble. I would call that Tuesday.

The market priced a quarter of investment as if it were a quarter of decline. Those are not the same thing. Not close.

Intel Beat and Lost a Quarter of Its Value

Intel is the cleanest example of the week. Earnings of $0.52 per share against $0.40 expected. Revenue of $16.5 billion, up 21%. Foundry revenue up 16% from the prior quarter. That is a beat, plain and simple.

The stock fell 28.58% on Friday. Down 25.22% on the week.

What did it was the forecast, not the quarter. Management guided the fourth quarter below expectations, flagged a personal computer slowdown running into next year, and said 2027 will be a growth year for data center and artificial intelligence work but also an investment year, with higher spending and no positive free cash flow. Fair enough. Also worth saying out loud: Intel had roughly tripled this year before that report. Sometimes a stock that has run that far just needs an excuse.

Here Is the Pattern

Meta beat on revenue. Punished. Alphabet grew 25% with cloud up 103%. Punished hardest of all. Microsoft beat AND cut spending. Still down. Intel beat. Lost a quarter of its value. Amazon down 3.66%. Nvidia down 3.97%.

Beat, miss, spend more, spend less. It did not matter. When this market decides to reprice a theme, it sells the theme first and reads the fine print later. So understand clearly what last week measured. It measured mood toward artificial intelligence spending. It did not measure which of these businesses is actually winning.

Now Look at What You Were Not Shown

While the Nasdaq fell 2.34%, the equal weighted S&P 500, which treats the smallest company in the index the same as the biggest, rose 0.68% and set a new high on Thursday. Smaller companies gained 1.14%.

Nine of eleven sectors finished higher. Health care up 2.84%. Materials up 2.57%. Utilities up 2.12%. Energy up 1.88%. Staples up 1.52%. Real estate up 1.41%. Consumer discretionary up 1.25%. Industrials up 1.14%. Financials up 0.91%. Only two fell, and they are precisely the two you would guess: communication services, home to Alphabet and Meta, down 4.89%, and technology, down 2.50%.

Then the economy walked in and grew 3.4%, up from 2.2% last quarter and 2.1% before that, with price pressures easing in the same report.

And the sharpest fact of the week: since its high on October 6, the Nasdaq is down 9.11%. The equal weighted S&P made its high on October 29. Two days before I wrote this. Same market. Same week. Completely different experience depending on what you own.

Stocks and Bonds Keep Different Clocks

Long term bonds rose again, a third straight week, and rates kept drifting lower. I have told you for weeks that I think rates come down, and I still think that.

But notice: rates fell and big technology fell on the same days. That frustrates people. It should not. Money leaving those seven names had to go somewhere, and it went into bonds and into the nine sectors that finished green. If you are sitting there waiting for lower rates to lift everything at once on the same afternoon, you will wait a long time and feel lousy doing it. The market does not owe any of us a tidy story while it is happening.

Own Good Businesses. Then Let Them Work.

To paraphrase Warren Buffett, what matters over a lifetime of investing is owning good businesses and staying out of their way.

The companies that reported last week are good businesses. Enormous revenue. Dominant positions. Cloud divisions doubling. A billion people on a product that did not exist in its current form two years ago. And they are run by operators whose own money and reputations ride on the next ten years, not the next ten days.

Those people are in it. They adjust. Microsoft already did, trimming its spending plan this very quarter. That is what good operators do when the facts move. It is also the strongest case for patience that I can give you.

Now the honest part, because you deserve both sides. I could be early. If these investments take longer to pay off than management expects, or if rates stay high longer than I think, this adjustment keeps going. That is a real risk and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

But I will tell you what I am not going to do. I am not going to sell a great business in the same week it grew revenue 25% and doubled its cloud division, because a headline made me uncomfortable. A diversified investor had a perfectly good week last week. If you want to sit down and go through exactly what you own and why, call me. That is the conversation worth having right now.

On the Radar — November 2 – 6

• Monday, November 2
  Apple (AAPL) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $2.03)
• Tuesday, November 3
  AMD (AMD) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $1.97)
• Tuesday, November 3
  Arista Networks (ANET) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $1.10)
• Tuesday, November 3
  Super Micro Computer (SMCI) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $1.26)
• Wednesday, November 4
  Datadog (DDOG) earnings — before the open(Est. EPS: $0.67)
• Wednesday, November 4
  Qualcomm (QCOM) earnings — after the close(Est. EPS: $2.20)
• Thursday, November 5
  Arm Holdings (ARM) earnings(Est. EPS: $0.48)