Intel erupts from a .com bubble base while Charter breaks down from a massive top.
April 27, 2026
Friday was one of those sessions that reminds you earnings season isn’t about the numbers, it’s about the reaction to the numbers.
We saw a semiconductor stock deliver the best earnings reaction of the 21st century, while a telecom giant suffered its worst reaction ever.
And when you step back and look at the Beat Sheet, the dispersion is what stands out.
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Most companies did what they were supposed to do. Beats were the norm across semis, medical devices, energy services, gold, and asset managers, yet the market rewarded only a select group of names.
Intel $INTC, Edwards Lifesciences $EW, Baker Hughes $BKR, and Newmont $NEM all caught bids.
But when you turn to the bottom of the Beat Sheet, you see names like VeriSign $VRSN, HCA Healthcare $HCA, and Comfort Systems $FIX selling off despite holding up on the fundamental side of the equation.
That’s capital rotating with intent, rewarding exposure to the right themes and punishing everything else, regardless of whether the quarter itself was “good enough.”
Nowhere was that more obvious than in Intel.
Intel beat its revenue, margin, and EPS expectations, marking its 6th consecutive quarter of beating guidance, and management made it very clear that demand continues to outstrip supply across the business.
The driver behind that demand is exactly what you’d expect: artificial intelligence.
But the key nuance here is that Intel is benefiting from the re-emergence of the CPU as the orchestration layer of the entire stack, with customers deploying CPUs alongside accelerators in increasingly balanced configurations.
That shift matters because it reframes Intel’s role in the AI ecosystem from a laggard trying to catch up to a foundational piece of the infrastructure buildout.
And when you pair that with improved yields on next-generation nodes, stronger pricing, and a business that is finally executing again, you get the kind of setup where fundamentals and technicals start to confirm each other.
Which brings us to the chart...
Intel just put the finishing touches on a textbook .com bubble base.
And historically, when we see a stock breakout of a structure that large on the back of a fundamental inflection like this, the upside move is almost always much larger than most expect.
So long as INTC holds this breakout, we expect the stock to continue to trend higher and outperform the broader market.
And then, almost as if the market wanted to make the contrast as clear as possible, you had Charter Communications on the other end of the spectrum.
Where Intel is emerging from a massive base, Charter is resolving a massive top.
Charter Communications has spent the past decade carving out a distribution pattern, and finally broke down late last year.
Since then, the stock has flipped a shelf of former support into resistance, and it now looks poised to make a fresh leg lower.
The fundamentals are not helping...
Revenues are declining year-over-year, internet subscriber losses continue amid intensifying competition, and EBITDA is slipping as the business struggles to offset structural headwinds in video and broadband.
Even though there are pockets of strength, the core business is under pressure from multiple angles.
So when Charter delivered mixed results, the stock collapsed, falling more than 25% in its worst earnings reaction ever.
And that move didn’t come out of nowhere. It was the market finally resolving a bearish structure that had been in place for years, using earnings as the excuse to accelerate what price had already been signaling.
Until proven otherwise, the path of least resistance is decisively lower for CHTR.
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