Alphabet Shed $500 Billion, Then Amazon And Intel Fell

Alphabet lost roughly $500 billion of market value in a single session on Thursday, by the Wall Street Journal's count, and the selling did not stop there. Amazon and Intel both reported after the close, and both were marked down sharply in Friday's premarket, the thin trading that runs before the opening bell. Binance suspended withdrawals after a suspected breach the exchange says affected $6.3 billion, and the Bank of Japan said it had finally reached the 2% inflation target it set in 2013.

Fast Facts

• The U.S. national debt reached 100% of gross domestic product for the government's budget year that ended September 30, the first year-end in triple digits since 1946 (Read More)
• GDP grew at an annual rate of 3.4% in the third quarter, the last major read on the economy before the midterm elections (Read More)
• Candy and gum prices have risen 7.7% in a year and more than 18% over two years, according to the latest federal data (Read More)
• Roblox said average daily users fell 9% to 138 million and engagement hours fell 15% to 34 billion (Read More)
• After Reddit's chief executive warned that daily visitors could drop by a low double-digit percentage in the fourth quarter, the shares fell 21.1% (Read More)
• Josh Kushner's Thrive Holdings agreed to buy ADT for $7.6 billion, paying $10 a share in cash against Wednesday's closing price of $7.41 (Read More)

Global News

• Christine Lagarde is stepping down early as president of the European Central Bank, saying she wants to be free to speak out (Read More)
• France's economy unexpectedly contracted in the third quarter as exports slumped (Read More)
• China's CSI300 index fell to a one-year low in a 12th straight losing week, down 14% over that stretch (Read More)
• Around 91% of the Monte dei Paschi shareholders who voted rejected the bank's own defense offers, valued together at nearly $40 billion, launched in August to fend off Intesa's takeover bid (Read More)

The Selling That Started With Alphabet Reached Amazon And Intel Overnight

Our last briefing covered Alphabet's and Microsoft's quarterly numbers. Thursday's U.S. session ended lower, led down by the Nasdaq Composite, an index weighted heavily toward technology companies. Alphabet shares fell more than 13% that day, per the Economic Times, and the Wall Street Journal put the one-session fall in its market capitalization, which is the combined value of all its shares, at roughly $500 billion. The Journal called that one of the largest such drops for a single company on record.

Then Amazon and Intel reported after Thursday's close, and by early Friday the selling had widened. Futures, which are contracts that let traders agree now on a price for later, point to where the market may open. In an Investing.com snapshot timed 04:04am ET, futures on the Nasdaq 100 were down 2.16% while Dow futures were down 0.05%. Hold those two side by side: an index is only what it is made of. The Nasdaq 100 is thick with the large technology companies at the center of this story, while the Dow tracks 30 companies leaning industrial and consumer. Intel was down 25% in that snapshot and Amazon down 7.2%.

Amazon's quarter is the one worth slowing down for. Its cloud division, AWS, reported revenue of $45.98 billion, up 39% from a year earlier and above the $45.29 billion analysts expected. The cloud business grew faster than expected and the shares still fell. A share price is a judgement about profits still to come, not a receipt for the quarter just finished. What moves it is the gap between the result and what investors already assumed, plus whether the money going out is visibly turning into cash coming in. Free cash flow, the cash left after running the business and paying for buildings and equipment, was negative $42.4 billion over the previous twelve months, against positive $14.8 billion a year earlier. Amazon repeated its expected 2026 capital expenditure of about $220 billion, meaning spending on long-lived things like data centers and chips.

Two caveats. A premarket quote is not a closing price: those 04:04am ET figures come from thin early trading, and the Friday session has since opened. And Intel's trouble is not Amazon's. Intel warned it would burn cash this year on a weak PC market and bottlenecks in its own manufacturing, and MarketWatch pointed to memory-chip prices denting demand. These sessions tell you what the market had assumed about AI spending, not what that spending will eventually be worth.

Sources: WSJ on the session · WSJ on Alphabet's market value · TechCrunch on Amazon · Investing.com on Friday's futures · MarketWatch on Intel · our briefing of October 29

Binance Froze Withdrawals After A Suspected Hack And Promised To Cover The Losses

Binance, the largest cryptocurrency exchange, a company that lets people buy, sell and store digital coins, suspended deposits and withdrawals on Thursday after what it described as a security breach. Co-founder Yi He wrote on X that "User funds are safe" and that "Binance will cover all hacking losses." How much was taken is not settled. The exchange's own figure, the one the Wall Street Journal and Forbes carried in their headlines, is $6.3 billion, which would make it the biggest crypto theft on record. Axios reported that users saw upwards of $5.7 billion drained from wallets, the accounts that hold the coins, and put the analyst range at $1.7 billion to $5.7 billion. That range is not sloppiness: in the hours after a breach nobody has a full accounting, and the estimates come from people reading public blockchain records rather than from an audit.

When you buy crypto on an exchange, the exchange usually holds the actual coins for you in wallets it controls, and your balance is an entry in its books. That arrangement is called custody, and it works the way a bank holding your deposit does: the money in your account app is a promise from the bank, not cash in a drawer with your name on it. So a theft from an exchange is a theft from the single pool backing everybody's balances at once. That is why Binance, and not any individual customer, is the one promising to make people whole, and why keeping that promise depends on the company having enough of its own money to do it. Axios notes that a hit this large could leave a smaller exchange exposed if customers all tried to withdraw at once.

Prices moved, though they are a separate question from custody. The Economic Times reported that bitcoin fell more than 4% to a six-week low below $78,000, with ether and BNB also lower, and the Journal reported bitcoin and ether down over 3% each before paring some of the loss. The blockchain analysis firm TRM Labs suspects hackers linked to North Korea, the attribution also given to the roughly $1.5 billion theft from the Bybit exchange in 2025.

Sources: WSJ on the breach · Axios · Forbes · Economic Times on bitcoin

The Bank Of Japan Says It Finally Hit 2%, Thirteen Years Later

The Bank of Japan held its benchmark interest rate, the rate that sets the baseline cost of borrowing across the Japanese economy, unchanged on Friday at 1.25%. The hold was widely expected. The news was what the bank said alongside it. Japan's central bank declared that it had reached its 2% inflation target, the public number a central bank commits to aiming at each year so that households and businesses can plan, more than 13 years after setting that goal in 2013. Tokyo core inflation held above the target in October, and the bank signalled rate rises ahead, with the pause giving earlier increases, including one in September, more time to work through the economy. Japanese government bond yields fell ahead of the decision.

For most of three decades Japan's problem was the opposite of prices rising too fast. Prices stalled or fell, which is called deflation, and it makes people put off buying because the same money buys more later, while making existing debts harder to repay. A central bank fighting that has no reason to make borrowing more expensive. One that has reached its target does, which is why the declaration lands harder than the hold. Persistent inflation, rising oil and semiconductor prices and a weak yen have many forecasters expecting another increase in December, though nothing has been decided. The same shift shows up in the bank's stock holdings. It spent years buying exchange-traded funds, which are baskets of shares that trade like a single stock, to support Japan's market. It now plans to speed up sales toward 860 billion yen a year at book value, meaning the price originally paid, which the Economic Times puts at about $5.45 billion. Even at the faster pace the sell-off runs 43 years instead of the 112 years previously estimated. Selling any quicker would push down the very prices the bank is selling into.

Sources: WSJ · Economic Times on the 2% target · Economic Times on the ETF sales · Investing.com on Tokyo inflation

What To Watch

Reporting today:

• ExxonMobil (XOM) is expected before the opening bell, with analysts' average estimate at $3.90 in earnings per share against $1.88 a year ago, and Chevron (CVX) at $4.78 against $1.85.

Next week:

• Apple (AAPL) is expected Monday after the close, at an average estimate of $1.98 against $1.85 a year ago, with Palantir (PLTR) the same afternoon at $0.33 against $0.18.
• Tuesday is the heaviest day of the season, with 283 companies scheduled and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) expected after the close at $1.68 against $0.97. It is also U.S. Election Day.

Later:

• The Federal Open Market Committee next meets December 8-9, with a fresh set of the officials' own published forecasts. Investors widely expect a rate rise, and an expectation is not a decision.
• The Bank of Japan's next move is also expected in December.
• Every earnings figure above is an estimate, not a result.

The Classroom Takeaway

Thursday showed how much one company can move a whole index, and Friday's premarket showed which index: Nasdaq 100 futures were down 2.16% while Dow futures were down 0.05%, in the same snapshot. Students can watch that gap open and close in a stock market simulator.