Stock Market Today (LIVE): Markets Close Out April With a Bang; Data Center Surprise Sends QCOM Up 15%

📌 Top story — scroll down for more updates

Closing Bell

1:10 pm

U.S. stocks closed April at records, with the Nasdaq posting its best month since early 2020. The rally was broad but uneven. Caterpillar (CAT +9.88%) surged 9.5% after raising its full-year outlook on data center construction demand. Alphabet (GOOG +10.00%) gained 9% on cloud strength, while Meta Platforms (META 8.49%) fell 8% on elevated AI spending plans and Microsoft (MSFT 3.90%) slipped 4% on similar concerns. Nvidia (NVDA 4.43%) dropped 4%.

• Caterpillar’s data center windfall: Heavy equipment is now an AI trade. CAT’s results show the buildout is moving serious iron.
• Macro headwinds building: Q1 GDP missed estimates, the Fed’s inflation gauge ticked up on energy prices, and oil sits above $105/barrel amid Iran tensions.

Textron Sheds Dead Weight, Stock Pops 10%

3:06 pm – +6.40%

Textron (TXT +6.88%) has had a pretty decent Thursday — beats on earnings and revenue, and oh yeah, decided to ditch the part of its business that makes golf carts. Q1 earnings came in at $1.45 per share on $3.7 billion in sales, ahead of the $1.32 and $3.5 billion Wall Street expected. Sales rose 12% year over year.

• Marie Kondo Would Approve: Textron is spinning off its slow-growth Industrial division to go all-in on helicopters, jets, and military vehicles, the businesses actually sparking joy (and double-digit growth).
• What’s Left Looks Great: The slimmed-down Textron carries a $19 billion backlog and $12 billion in annual revenue, with Aviation posting a jaw-dropping 22% sales jump in Q1.

Today’s Change

(6.88%) $6.18

Current Price

$95.96

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$17B

Day’s Range

$91.47 – $97.61

52wk Range

$69.46 – $101.57

Volume

2

Avg Vol

1.6M

Gross Margin

18.21%

Dividend Yield

0.08%

Qualcomm Surges 15% on Chip Deal News

2:53 pm — QCOM +14.78%

Qualcomm (QCOM +15.12%) exploded 15% Thursday after Q2 earnings topped estimates — but the real story is CEO Cristiano Amon dropping a bombshell: the company has landed a “leading hyperscaler” as its first data center chip customer, with shipments starting in December. That’s a big deal for a company that didn’t exist in this market a year ago.

• From phones to data centers: Qualcomm built its empire on smartphone chips — branching into data centers is a genuine new growth frontier, not a pivot born of desperation. Qualcomm has a Superscore of 56 in the Moneyball Hidden Gems data centers database. The database notes that “Qualcomm’s customer lock-in and strategic positioning within the data center ecosystem are still evolving, with current relationships often involving technical integrations and national partnerships rather than established long-term, binding contracts with major hyperscalers.”
• Don’t chase just yet: Q3 guidance disappointed, and most analyst price targets still sit at or below today’s price. The opportunity may be real — the timing less certain.

Keytruda Drives Merck Q1 Beat

2:18 pm — MRK -0.87%

Merck (MRK 1.59%) posted Q1 sales of $16.29 billion, up 5% and ahead of the $15.85 billion Wall Street expected. Keytruda, its flagship cancer drug, grew 12%. The company raised its full-year sales and earnings guidance. Yesterday, TMFSelena called Merck’s valuation “reasonable at recent levels,” noting its price-to-sales ratio of 4.2x, roughly equal to the five-year average, and a forward P/E ratio of 21.5x. “For long-term investors, this seems worth a look,” she added.

• Behind the bottom-line loss: A $3.62-per-share charge from the $9.2 billion acquisition of Cidara Therapeutics drove a net loss of $1.72 per share — but adjusted EPS of -$1.28 beat estimates of -$1.47.
• The patent clock is ticking: Keytruda’s main U.S. patent expires in 2028. Merck’s injectable version, Qlex, generated $128 million in Q1 and could help cushion the blow.

Today’s Lunchtime News

1:10 pm — NVDA -4.1%

Nvidia (NVDA 4.43%) shares fell more than 4% as investors weighed mounting competitive pressure from hyperscalers building and selling their own AI chips, even as other chipmakers climbed.

• Hyperscaler encroachment: On its earnings call Wednesday, Amazon (AMZN +0.77%) flagged a booming in-house chip business, while Alphabet (GOOG +10.00%) said it plans to sell its custom Tensor Processing Units to select customers who will install the chips in their own data centers. The shift gives big tech buyers more options beyond Nvidia’s GPUs and chips away at the company’s near-monopoly on AI accelerators.
• China pressure: A crackdown on chip smuggling in China has nearly doubled prices for Nvidia’s restricted B300 servers to roughly $1 million each, according to a Reuters report. The dynamic underscores how export controls and emerging hyperscaler silicon are squeezing Nvidia’s pricing power and customer concentration story at the same time.

Today’s Change

(-4.43%) $-9.27

Current Price

$199.98

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$4.8T

Day’s Range

$198.70 – $210.28

52wk Range

$110.82 – $216.82

Volume

22K

Avg Vol

176M

Gross Margin

71.07%

Dividend Yield

0.02%

Hexatronic’s Data Center Segment Takes the Lead

1:05 pm — HTRO +19.0%

Hexatronic‘s (HTRO +19.01%) Q1 2026 report caused a see-saw price reaction of -/+20% — clearly the market couldn’t make up its mind, at least initially.

The headline numbers were lukewarm: revenue of SEK 1.7 billion, down 10% year-over-year, though 9 of those 10 percentage points were pure FX headwinds. Strip out currency, and the underlying business is essentially flat. The market didn’t care about the top line — what it cared about was the mix shift finally becoming undeniable.

Top of the Morning

12:15 pm — PI +17.2%

Moments happen in investing. You know how it is. A stock that’s been absolutely nowhere on anyone’s radar suddenly pops for … reasons. That’s where we are today.

Helllllooooooooo, Impinj (PI +20.73%)!

The maker of the endpoint circuits that give life to the wireless RFID tags we use to track everything from luggage to supply chain inventory was soaring today pre-market. Shares are up close to 20% on an incredible surge in its backlog.

“Endpoint IC bookings hit an all-time record, engendering a strong second-quarter revenue outlook,” Chris Diorio, co-founder and CEO said in a statement.

How big are we talking? A 40.7% sequential increase in revenue at the mid-point of guidance, for starters.

Custom ASICs — specialized chips built for a single purpose — are driving the increase, and most of it appears to be coming from 1-2 customers. Still, it’s a significant uptick and worth watching. Endpoint ICs can be essential for digitizing real-world environments.

More digitized shopping and increasing reliance on self-checkout at retailers and grocery stores could keep this trend going for a while.

11:15 am — LLY +7.9%

Eli Lilly (LLY +10.01%) is pushing its weight around in the GLP-1 wars as it reported blockbuster Q1 2026 earnings results. The company reported earnings of $8.55 per share, excluding non-recurring items, $1.58 better than the FactSet Consensus of $6.97, while revenues rose 55.5% year/year to $19.8 bln vs the $17.82 bln FactSet Consensus. The results were driven by the eye-popping sales growth of Mounjaro +125% to $8.66 bln and Zepbound +80% to $4.16 bln. These results were primarily volume driven and despite a 13% decrease due to lower realized prices. This led to the company raising revenue and EPS guidance for FY 2026.

While Lilly is showing impressive results in its current products, they aren’t getting complacent.

Should Taxes Stop You From Selling Investments?

12:10 pm

Has this ever happened to you?

You’re looking at your portfolio, and you come across an investment that you no longer want to own. You pull up your broker’s website, and you’re about to click the “Sell” button…but then you think about the taxes you’ll owe. (Presuming, of course, that this is in a taxable brokerage account and not in a tax-advantaged retirement account.)

You hem, you haw. You think about writing a check to Uncle Sam in April. And then you begin to convince yourself that actually, maybe this investment isn’t so bad after all.

Here’s another scenario, one I occasionally hear about from Motley Fool members during Fool24. (Tune in to the Retirement Show every Tuesday at 12 p.m. ET and the Financial Planning “Ask Me Anything” every Friday at 12 p.m. ET.) Members tell us they want to move on from a financial advisor, but they’re hesitant due to the tax bill that would result from selling all the mediocre funds the advisor has chosen. Or they want to hire a new advisor, but the pros they’re considering have said that all current investments must be sold (a common requirement since advisors only want to be responsible for the investments that they personally recommend).

Thus, after considering all the tax consequences, investors often choose to stick with the subpar status quo.

It certainly makes sense to factor taxes into both your buying and selling decisions and to note them when you decide in which accounts to implement those decisions.

But that doesn’t mean tax consequences should prevent you from optimizing your portfolio. Because it may not take too long for a better investment to overcome the tax hit from moving on.

Intel’s Data Center Surge Rewrites the Story

10:05 am

Intel (INTC 0.35%) just delivered the kind of quarter that rewrites the narrative on a struggling business. Adjusted EPS of $0.29 obliterated the $0.01 Wall Street consensus, while revenue of $13.6 billion grew 7% year over year and topped expectations by more than $1 billion. The standout engine was the Data Center and AI segment, where revenue jumped 22% to $5.1 billion as hyperscalers raced to buy server CPUs to support “agentic AI” workloads, the kind that orchestrate tasks alongside graphics chips. That demand showed up in margins too, with non-GAAP gross margin expanding to 41% thanks to better pricing, favorable mix, and improved 18A manufacturing yields, the latter referring to Intel’s most advanced chip production process.

The picture isn’t uniformly clean, though.

Amazon’s Record Quarter Can’t Escape Capex Cloud

10:00 am — AMZN -0.6%

Amazon (AMZN +0.77%) just reported one of the strongest quarters in its history, but investors are still stuck asking the same question we’ve been asking all year: when does all this spending truly start to pay off?

The headline numbers were — as expected — fantastic. Revenue came in well above expectations, growing 17% year over year. Operating income saw record margins (north of 13%), with AWS growing 28% year-over-year, which is that segment’s fastest growth rate in 15 quarters. Moreover, its $2 billion sequential revenue jump from the fourth quarter was the biggest increase from the fourth to first quarter in AWS’s history.

Success wasn’t just on the cloud side, though; Amazon’s stores business saw 15% unit growth, its own best since the end of COVID lockdowns, and Amazon’s burgeoning advertising business grew a whopping 24%. By almost every count, this was a stellar quarter. And yet shares initially slid around 3% after hours before recovering.

Opening Bell

9:35 am — CAT +7.2%, AMZN +2.0%, META -9.2%, MSFT -2.6%

The market is showing resilience this Thursday as the major indexes climb, fueled by a stellar earnings season. Caterpillar (CAT +9.88%) and Amazon (AMZN +0.77%) are providing the heavy lifting, with the former jumping 7% on robust quarterly figures and the latter climbing as much as 4% following a “blockbuster” report. However, it isn’t all sunshine in Big Tech; Meta Platforms (META 8.49%) plummeted 7% due to weak user growth, while Microsoft (MSFT 3.90%) slipped as AI-related capital expenditures are projected to hit $190 billion.

Amazon’s Cloud Boom Justifies the Spend

9:05 am

Amazon (AMZN +0.77%) just delivered the kind of beat that resets expectations on a slowing growth narrative. Revenue climbed 17% year over year to $181.5 billion, beating consensus by more than $4 billion, while EPS of $2.78 nearly doubled the $1.64 analysts had penciled in. The headline driver was Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division, which grew 28% to $37.6 billion. That marks its fastest growth pace in roughly four years and reverses the deceleration that had worried investors last quarter. Advertising added another tailwind, growing 24% to $17.2 billion as Amazon scaled new AI-driven ad tools and broadened partnerships with Netflix and others.

The catch shows up in cash flow.

Pershing Square USA Opens 18% Below IPO Price

7:45 am — PSUS +1.34% in pre-market trading

Billionaire Bill Ackman’s highly anticipated Pershing Square USA faced a rough start on the New York Stock Exchange, opening at $41–roughly 18% below its $50 IPO price. The $5 billion closed-end fund launch attempted to entice investors with a unique “sweetener,” granting one share of the parent asset manager, Pershing Square, for every five shares of PSUS purchased. However, the market quickly applied a steep discount to both entities, with PS shares also falling 25% shortly after they began trading. The lackluster debut reflects immediate investor skepticism regarding the closed-end structure, which often sees shares trade at a discount to their underlying net asset value.

• Structural Headwinds: Unlike open-ended mutual funds, PSUS’s closed-end format means its price is dictated by market demand rather than asset value, a dynamic that triggered an instant sell-off.
• The Permanent Capital Play: Despite the rocky start, the $5 billion raise provides Ackman with a massive pool of capital to execute concentrated activist bets without the threat of investor redemptions.

This Morning’s Breakfast News

7:30 am — GOOG +5.94% in pre-market trading

Alphabet (GOOG +10.00%) soared over 7% ahead of the market open thanks to quarterly results easily beating market expectations, with AI demand evident from Cloud revenue jumping 63% year over year and net income rising 81% over the same period.

• “In summary, a terrific start to the year”: CEO Sundar Pichai explained investments in AI were paying off, with the “full-stack approach” driving performance. Adoption of the Gemini app saw the strongest ever quarter for consumer subscription AI plans.
• “Investors have every reason to be bullish”: Fool analyst Sanmeet Deo commented “these results prove that Alphabet’s massive AI investments are translating into tangible, spectacular financial returns,” with the business being “perfectly positioned to dominate the AI revolution while actively rewarding its shareholders.”

Alphabet’s AI Boom Drives Record Q1 Gain

5:45 am — GOOG +6.10% in pre-market trading

Alphabet‘s (GOOG +10.00%) stock has doubled over the past year, squashing rumors of its demise and concerns over its position in the AI race. While AI models have frequently been trading the pole position after every new version release, Alphabet is showing its AI initiatives are flowing through its entire business.

Alphabet delivered a blockbuster Q1 2026, completely crushing expectations. Consolidated revenues reached $109.9 billion, representing a massive 22% year-over-year increase. This was the first 20%+ revenue growth quarter since Q1 2022! Profitability exploded alongside top-line growth, with net income jumping 81% and earnings per share surging 82% to $5.11. The undeniable star of the quarter was Google Cloud, which saw revenues accelerate 63% to cross the $20 billion threshold for the very first time.

These results prove that Alphabet’s massive AI investments are translating into tangible, spectacular financial returns. Google Cloud’s backlog nearly doubled quarter over quarter to over $460 billion, driven by surging enterprise AI demand.

ICYMI: Wednesday’s Scoreboard

5:15 am — CRWD -0.75% in pre-market trading

CrowdStrike (CRWD 1.47%) was the subject of the latest Scoreboard video.

Microsoft AI Hits $37B Annual Run Rate

5:00 am — MSFT +0.34% in pre-market trading

Microsoft (MSFT 3.90%) just reported a quarter that beat on basically every number that matters, and the stock still dropped after hours. Such is the state of AI enthusiasm, where some companies are ripping, and some draw yawns despite really hauling the mail.

Azure grew 40%, better than anyone expected, and revenue hit $82.9 billion. Word is the AI business is now running at a $37 billion annual pace, up 123% year over year. And yet: down 3% after hours. That’s the strange place Microsoft occupies right now. The company is executing well by almost any measure, but investors are doing the math on $130 billion in annual infrastructure spending and aiming a very hairy eyeball at a Copilot adoption rate that’s still hovering around 3% of its enormous user base. (I get it. I use Copilot on windows, and every time I do, I’m sorry.)

Today’s Change

(-3.90%) $-16.55

Current Price

$407.91

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$3.0T

Day’s Range

$398.01 – $414.42

52wk Range

$356.28 – $555.45

Volume

5.4K

Avg Vol

36M

Gross Margin

68.31%

Dividend Yield

0.85%

Meta “Continues to Get More Attractive on Weakness”

4:15 am — META -7.01% in pre-market trading

Meta (META 8.49%) just dropped a monster Q1 2026, posting $56.31 billion in revenue, which is up 33% year over year. Earnings per share (EPS) crushed expectations at $10.44. The company also teased its highly anticipated first model from “Meta Superintelligence Labs”.

Meta’s advertising machine is absolutely printing money! Ad impressions jumped 19% and the average price per ad climbed 12%. However, don’t let the shiny $10.44 EPS fool you; an $8.03 billion one-time tax benefit massively inflated that bottom-line number. Also, daily active people (DAP) saw a rare sequential dip to 3.56 billion, blamed on internet disruptions in Iran and blocked WhatsApp access in Russia.

Meta issued solid Q2 revenue guidance of $58 billion to $61 billion, but management is also opening the wallet much wider. On the bullish case, Meta is firing on all cylinders with surging ad demand and pricing power. Its pivot toward “personal superintelligence” keeps the long-term growth story incredibly exciting.

Today’s Change

(-8.49%) $-56.81

Current Price

$612.31

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$1.6T

Day’s Range

$600.00 – $620.62

52wk Range

$520.26 – $796.25

Volume

3.7K

Avg Vol

15M

Gross Margin

81.94%

Dividend Yield

0.34%

Before the Opening Bell

4:00 am

Wall Street is processing a volatile Thursday morning as surging oil prices and a mixed “Magnificent Seven” report card rattle investor confidence. Brent crude soared past $125 per barrel–a wartime high–after President Trump signaled a long-term naval blockade against Iran until a new nuclear deal is reached. While Alphabet (GOOG +10.00%) provided a rare bright spot with solid sales, peers Meta (META 8.49%) and Microsoft (MSFT 3.90%) saw shares retreat as investors questioned the high price tag of their AI infrastructure. All eyes now shift to Apple (AAPL +0.44%), which reports after today’s close, with shareholders seeking clarity on how the iPhone maker plans to monetize its own artificial intelligence roadmap.

• Energy Shock Contagion: Persistent disruptions in the Strait of Hormuz are driving global inflation fears, complicating the outlook for further rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.
• The AI Expenditure Filter: Markets are no longer rewarding high-tech companies for simply investing in AI; they are actively punishing those that cannot demonstrate immediate, scalable revenue from that spending.