Still lagging FanDuel, DraftKings reports better-than-expected Q2 revenue

Intel shares surged in after-hours trading Thursday after the semiconductor giant reported much-better-than-expected Q1 earnings and sales numbers and robust guidance for Q2.

Intel reported:

• Q1 revenue of $13.6 billion vs. a consensus expectation for $12.42 billion.

• Adjusted earnings per share of $0.29 vs. the $0.02 consensus estimate from FactSet.

• A forecast for Q2 sales of between $13.8 billion and $14.8 billion vs. analysts’ $13.11 billion expectation.

• A forecast for adjusted Q2 EPS of $0.20 vs. Wall Street expectations for $0.10.

“The next wave of AI will bring intelligence closer to the end user, moving from foundational models to inference to agentic. This shift is significantly increasing the need for Intel’s CPUs and wafer and advanced packaging offerings,” Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan said in the company’s earnings release.

Shares were up 15% shortly after the report in after-hours trading.

The numbers are a significant coda to what has been one of the best periods of share price performance for the company in decades. In April alone, Intel was up roughly 50% ahead of its earnings release, and the stock had more than tripled over the last 12 months.

That run-up, however, had far outpaced Intel’s actual business results, resulting in a nosebleed-inducing forward price-to-earnings valuation of nearly 100x expected earnings over the next 12 months, dwarfing even the valuations the company was receiving during the peak of the dot-com boom of the 1990s.

Well, here is an absolute banger of a chart from Fundstrat that is sure to simultaneously please and annoy everyone:

Macro data scientist Alex Wang’s chart on the causes of the five best and worst market days during different presidencies demonstrates how much the Oval Office drives US stock market volatility during Trump’s second term in office.

My very loose, abstract description of what policymakers do is “try to make things better.” (As for what constitutes “things” and “better,” well, tens of millions of Americans will have to agree to disagree.)

Most of the time, these things the president and Congress pursue are not a massive shock to the financial system, though there’s always a doomsayer warning that something like Obamacare will spell the end for US stocks. And that means most of the time you can probably expect a positive skew: policymakers will be coming in with stimulus to support the economy and markets in the face of unexpected downside.

Per Fundstrat’s analysis, that clearly hasn’t been the case in the past 15 months. You can look at this one of two ways. Perhaps this period has been a time of such economic stability and impressive earnings growth that some of those other catalysts for massive one-day drops haven’t materialized. We’re blessed to have gotten to enjoy such a solid backdrop! Or you could suggest this is indicative of a fundamentally more activist presidency and more frequent policy decisions that have carry higher macroeconomic consequences compared to previous presidencies. We’re doomed to swing wildly based on what we see next on Truth Social!

There’ve been a lot of wonderful studies released by asset managers on the importance of not missing the 10 best days in the market in any given year. (It’s less often mentioned by folks who have a vested interest in you investing your money about how much better returns would be if you miss the 10 worst days of the year!) The problem is these sessions are typically clustered so close together that it’s an impossible task to navigate twisted, volatile waters so cleanly.

The upshot: Trump-induced volatility has been noise, with the biggest five losses nearly perfectly canceling out the biggest gains. There’s an underlying non-Trump, mainly-AI trend that’s mattered, and that’s probably the main reason the US stock market is where it is.