Intel's biggest day since 1987 🚀

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Stocks shrugged off a midweek software meltdown and a fresh oil scare to charge back to records by Friday, almost entirely on the back of Intel's biggest single-day pop since 1987.

The Nasdaq closed the week up 1.5% to a fresh record of 24,836.60 (within 200 points of 25,000 for the first time ever), while the S&P 500 added 0.6% and the Dow slipped 0.4%.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

📆 Tuesday 4/28 — Conference Board Consumer Confidence (10am ET): First fresh confidence read since the UMich survey hit a record low. A weak print would lock in the recession narrative.

📆 Wednesday 4/29 — FOMC rate decision (2pm ET): Markets price in roughly 85% odds of a hold at 3.50–3.75%. With no SEP this meeting, all eyes are on Powell's 2:30pm presser for guidance on Iran-driven inflation.

📆 Wednesday 4/29 — Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet & Amazon earnings (after the bell): Four Mag 7s in one night. Watch Azure and AWS growth, Meta's $115–$135B 2026 capex plan, and Google Cloud — the broadest single-day AI-spend stress test of the cycle.

📆 Thursday 4/30 — Q1 GDP advance + March PCE inflation (8:30am ET): Atlanta Fed GDPNow is tracking just 1.2% real growth. PCE is the Fed's preferred inflation gauge — a hot print plus weak GDP would put stagflation back on the board.

📆 Thursday 4/30 — Apple earnings (after the bell): Cook & Co. close out the Mag 7 week. Watch for any Siri AI launch timing update and a read on China-region demand.

🔼 The Nasdaq closed at a fresh record 24,836.60 Friday, up 1.6%, as Intel's blowout earnings sparked a chip-led rally that pushed the index within 200 points of 25,000 for the first time. The S&P 500 added 0.8% to a record 7,165.08 while the Dow slipped 0.16% to 49,230.71 as money rotated out of defensives. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index notched its 18th straight up day. (TheStreet)

💰️ Alphabet announced plans Friday to invest up to $40 billion in Anthropic — $10 billion in cash now at a $350 billion valuation, plus another $30 billion contingent on hitting performance targets. The deal lands days after Amazon committed up to $25 billion to the same startup. Anthropic's annual run-rate revenue has reportedly crossed $30 billion, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. (CNBC)

🔻 The University of Michigan's final April consumer sentiment index landed at 49.8, the lowest reading on record, after sliding from 53.3 in March. One-year inflation expectations spiked nearly a full percentage point from 3.8%, the largest one-month jump since April 2025, with respondents flagging Iran-war fallout, Hormuz-driven energy prices and rising tariffs as the biggest worries. (Bloomberg)

💵 U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs logged eight straight days of net inflows totaling about $2.1 billion through Thursday, pushing cumulative net inflows since launch above $58 billion and total assets above $102 billion. Bitcoin held near $77,650 into the weekend, just below the $80,000 mark, with BlackRock's IBIT accounting for roughly 75% of the week's flows. (CoinDesk)

🛢️ WTI crude fell more than 1% Friday to $94.40 a barrel and Brent settled near $105 as the U.S. and Iran prepared for talks mediated by Pakistan in Islamabad. Even with the Friday slide, Brent posted a double-digit weekly gain of more than 15% on continued Hormuz disruptions. Trump pulled the U.S. delegation Saturday, saying the talks could be done by phone instead. (CNBC)

🥇 Gold ticked up 0.24% Friday to about $4,709 an ounce but still posted its first weekly loss in three, slipping more than 2% as traders priced in a possible breakthrough in U.S.-Iran talks. The metal remains up over 25% year to date, with central-bank buying and inflation-hedge demand from retail investors continuing to underwrite the rally. (Fortune)

Intel rocketed 24% Friday to close at $82.57, the stock's biggest single-day gain since October 1987, after Thursday night's Q1 earnings landed as the cleanest beat the company has put up in years.

Adjusted EPS came in at $0.29 versus a Wall Street consensus that had been bracing for roughly a penny — with several shops modeling an outright loss. Revenue of $13.6 billion topped estimates by more than a billion dollars.

The number that did the real work was Data Center and AI revenue of $5.1 billion, up 22% year over year and nearly $700 million ahead of the $4.41 billion analysts had penciled in. Management then guided Q2 revenue to $13.8–$14.8 billion, comfortably above the $13.03 billion Street estimate.

CNBC framed it as the strongest sign yet of a turnaround under CEO Lip-Bu Tan, who marked his one-year anniversary by telling investors Intel is back to being "data driven, paranoid, and engineering driven" — a callback to Andy Grove's "only the paranoid survive" mantra — as agentic AI workloads finally drive demand for Intel CPUs.

Why it matters: Intel has spent the last three years as the cautionary tale of the AI boom — the chip company that missed the chip cycle. Friday flipped that script. The thesis Tan inherited and amplified is that agentic AI — autonomous AI agents executing long task chains — is much more CPU-heavy than the GPU-saturated training workloads that made Nvidia.

That thesis just printed a nearly $700 million data-center beat in a single quarter. The rally pulled the rest of the chip complex with it: AMD jumped roughly 13%, Arm Holdings popped about 14%, and Nvidia gained more than 4% to push its market cap back above $5 trillion.

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index strung together its 18th consecutive up day, the kind of streak you only see in full-blown momentum regimes.

Intel shares are now up 124% year to date — a stock that traded at single-digit P/E multiples a year ago is suddenly being talked about as an AI infrastructure play.

What to watch: Whether one quarter is a turning point or a one-off.

• The skeptical case is that some of Intel's data-center surge came from one-time hyperscaler inventory rebuilds, and Q2 will tell us how much was structural.

• The bullish case gets stress-tested next week when Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet report and reveal whether agentic-AI infrastructure spend is broadening beyond GPUs — watch hyperscaler capex commentary closely for any explicit Intel CPU call-outs.

Also worth tracking: the foundry. Intel's 18A process is the existential bet of Tan's tenure, and it was barely mentioned during Friday's rally.

If the company can pair a recovering CPU franchise with even modest external 18A foundry wins, the 2026 turnaround story has real legs.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Do your research before making any trades.