A big sell-off collides with more Big Tech earnings and a midterm election: What to watch this week

Last week, we opened the Morning Brief newsletter by saying the first week of Big Tech earnings looked promising — until Thursday. This time, we're here to say the second week of Big Tech earnings looked promising — until Tuesday.

Lackluster earnings from Alphabet ( GOOG ), Amazon ( AMZN ), Intel ( INTC ) sent the tech complex into a steep sell-off, ending a wild week that began with Anthropic's S-1 filing.

Coming into this week, all eyes will be on potential sparks to relight the fire under the tech sector. Fire, to be clear, in a bad way.

Kicking off the week on Monday are earnings from Apple ( AAPL ) and Palantir ( PLTR ), alongside Tower Semiconductor ( TSEM ) and Lattice Semiconductor ( LSCC ) in the chips sector.

On Tuesday, our focus shifts to politics, as US midterms are set to influence everything from control of Congress and the Iran war to the data center boom. On top of that, AMD ( AMD ) and Marathon Petroleum Corporation ( MPC ) both report earnings, and the US government will report JOLTS data in the first major labor market update of the week.

Wednesday and Thursday bring earnings from Toyota Motor ( TM ), ConocoPhillips ( COP ), Eaton Corporation ( ETN ), Arm Holdings ( ARM ), McDonald's ( MCD ), and a range of other corporate market heavyweights, alongside a smattering of economic data.

And all of that excitement sets up Friday's October nonfarm payrolls report, the banner data release of the week.

Big Tech's sell-off wasn't about the actual fundamentals

It was a deeply red week for the tech sector after a slew of earnings failed to give investors the signs of strength they were looking (and hoping) for.

At Alphabet, a miss on both revenue and profit sent shares falling 13% as Sundar Pichai said that while the company's search division had grown, the money wasn't keeping up as AI cuts into search monetization.

Down the street at Amazon, a double miss on both earnings and revenue triggered a sell-off that couldn't be stopped by strong cloud growth in AWS.

And we can't forget Intel, where a beat on earnings and in-line revenue were overshadowed by weakness in PC sales, attributed to heightened memory costs. That company lost a quarter of its value after the report, falling over 28%.

But there's a conundrum for investors in these earnings reports. As Barron's associate editor Al Root said to Yahoo Finance, the numbers weren't all bad; it's more like investors have gotten more demanding.

"It's not that the earnings were awful, it's just that it wasn't enough to support the market," Root said on "The 8:30." He added, "The level of nerves going into earnings season was so high, like everybody was waiting for the shoe to drop."