Bulls, Layoffs & a Ceasefire on Life Support

👋 Welcome Back Investors! (April 20 to 24, 2026)

First things first, my apologies for going quiet the last few weeks. Exam season hit hard, but we're back and we're not slowing down. Weekly blogs are back on schedule starting now.

And honestly, we couldn't have picked a better week to return. Markets hit fresh all time highs as ceasefire optimism kept the bulls running, Intel delivered one of the most jaw dropping earnings beats in decades, and Meta quietly dropped an 8,000 person layoff while simultaneously planning to spend $135 billion on AI. Tesla beat expectations but spooked investors with its spending plans, and the Nasdaq just keeps climbing like the Iran war is a minor inconvenience. Buckle up, a lot happened and we've got you covered.

💥 Intel's Best Day Since 1987

For years, Intel was the stock nobody wanted to talk about. Falling behind in the AI race, For years, Intel was the stock nobody wanted to talk about. Falling behind in the AI race, losing ground to Nvidia and AMD, bleeding money quarter after quarter. Then Thursday happened.

After the bell on April 23rd, Intel reported Q1 revenue of $13.6 billion against expectations of $12.4 billion, and adjusted EPS of $0.29, compared to analyst estimates of literally $0.01.

Friday's reaction was historic. Intel surged 24%, its best single day since 1987. AMD and Arm both jumped roughly 14%, and Nvidia climbed 4% to push its market cap back above $5 trillion. The driver was Intel's Data Center and AI division, which grew 22% year-over-year as demand for CPUs surged alongside agentic AI workloads. CEO Lip-Bu Tan said it best on the earnings call: "The CPU is reinserting itself as the indispensable foundation of the AI era." The company also locked in a multiyear deal with Google to power AI and cloud workloads, and confirmed it joined Elon Musk's Terafab project alongside SpaceX, xAI, and Tesla.

The turnaround, once just a promise, is starting to look very real.

🤖 Meta's 8,000 Person Bet on AI

On Thursday, Meta sent an internal memo to employees confirming it would cut 10% of its workforce, roughly 8,000 people, with layoffs beginning May 20th. On top of that, the company is scrapping plans to fill 6,000 open roles it had already been hiring for.

This isn't a one time thing either. In January, Meta quietly cut 10% of employees working on metaverse projects. In March, hundreds more were let go across Facebook, Reality Labs, and sales. And just this week, the company revealed it's replacing third-party content moderation vendors with AI. The pattern is clear, every human role being cut is being replaced with a model.

The bigger picture is the money. Zuckerberg's entire focus right now is catching up to OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in the AI race, and the workforce is funding that push. Meta shares fell 2.4% on Thursday and are roughly flat for the year. Meta isn't alone either. Microsoft announced the same week it would offer voluntary buyouts to 7% of U.S. staff, the first time in the company's 51 year history. Amazon has already axed 16,000 corporate jobs since January. Across Big Tech, AI is getting the money, and headcount is paying for it.

📈 Records on the Board

Wednesday was a good day to be a bull. The S&P 500 climbed 1.05% to close at 7,137 and the Nasdaq surged 1.64% to 24,657, both finishing at all time highs. The catalyst was simple: Trump extended the U.S. ceasefire with Iran, posting on Truth Social that Tehran's government was "seriously fractured" and that he'd hold off on resuming attacks until Iran could submit a unified proposal.

But don't let the record highs fool you into thinking everything is calm. The same day Trump extended the ceasefire, Iran's navy seized two container ships in the Strait of Hormuz. Brent crude pushed back above $100 a barrel. And JD Vance's trip to join peace talks was paused after Tehran called negotiations a "waste of time." Markets didn't care. And that might be the most interesting part of this whole week. Investors are officially starting to look past the Middle East and refocus on earnings, where over 80% of S&P 500 companies that have reported so far have beaten expectations. Boeing surged 5.5% on a smaller-than-expected loss. GE Vernova jumped nearly 14% on a revenue beat.

The war is still happening. The strait is still essentially closed. But Wall Street has decided it's seen enough to keep buying.

⚡ Tesla Beat the Numbers. The Numbers Don't Matter.

On paper, Tesla had a decent quarter. Revenue came in at $22.4 billion, beating expectations, and adjusted EPS of $0.41 crushed the $0.35 estimate. Gross margin hit 21.7%, well above what analysts were modeling. The stock initially jumped 4% after hours.

Then investors did the math.

Strip out regulatory credit sales and gains from selling Bitcoin, and Tesla made roughly $21 million in actual core profit from its car and battery business in Q1. Not $21 billion. $21 million. At its peak in 2023, that number was around $2 billion per quarter. And on the earnings call, CFO Vaibhav Taneja dropped the real headline: Tesla plans to spend over $25 billion in CapEx in 2026, triple what it spent in Q1 alone, and will post negative free cash flow for the rest of the year.

The market didn't take it well. Tesla fell 3.7% the next day and is now down 17% since January. The story at Tesla has always been Musk's vision carrying the valuation. Robotaxis, humanoid robots, Full Self-Driving — promises that are perpetually a year or two away. Right now, nearly 98% of Tesla's $1.4 trillion market cap is built on that vision, not on what the company is actually earning today. At some point, the vision has to show up in the numbers.

👀 Stocks to Watch: What This Week’s Moves Reveal

Markets closed the week at record highs, but not every stock was celebrating. Here are a few names worth watching that tell the broader story of where things are heading:

• ServiceNow (NOW | 9.68%) — One of the ugliest single day drops of the week. The company's subscription revenue growth was directly blamed on the Middle East conflict slowing enterprise deals. business spending.

• Boeing (BA | 2.78%) — A rare bright spot. The struggling aerospace giant posted a much smaller-than-expected quarterly loss and reported a record $695 billion backlog. After years of headlines about safety scandals and production problems, Boeing's turnaround is quietly picking up steam.

• GE Vernova (GEV | 13.01%) — The energy technology spinoff surged after beating revenue expectations. With the Iran war making energy security a top global priority, companies building power infrastructure are seeing serious tailwinds that aren't going away anytime soon.

🔔 That's a Wrap!

Markets closed the week at all time highs, and honestly it's hard to summarize it without sounding like a broken record, because the Iran war is still the only story that truly matters. The ceasefire held, stocks rallied, records were broken. Intel had its best day since 1987, Meta quietly announced it's cutting 8,000 people to fund an AI arms race, and Tesla beat earnings while somehow spooking investors at the same time. Heading into next week, all eyes stay on Pakistan, because one Truth Social post from Trump could flip the entire mood of this market in a single minute.

Until then, stay focused and stay curious. Catch you next week 👋