Monday starts with a cautious bounce, not a clean recovery: Sunday-night futures were modestly higher — Dow futures up about 0.2% to 0.3%, S&P 500 futures up about 0.2% to 0.3%, and Nasdaq-100 futures up about 0.3% to 0.5% — after Friday’s sell-off took the Nasdaq Composite down 2.86% to 25,437.00, the S&P 500 down 1.82% to 7,580.07, and the Dow down 1.09% to 51,770.31. That bounce now has to survive the busiest week of the quarter: Apple and Palantir report tonight, the midterm elections are Tuesday, AMD reports Tuesday night, and the October jobs report caps the week on Friday, with economists expecting about 55,000 new jobs. Oil above $100 — WTI closed Friday around $103.90 to $104.12 — is the inflation thread running under all of it.
1. Palantir (PLTR) — The cash printer with a valuation exam tonight
Palantir reports third-quarter results after the close today, Monday, November 2, with its webcast at 5:00 PM ET. The consensus bar is earnings of $0.41 a share on revenue of $2.18 billion — revenue up about 85% year over year from $1.18 billion, and earnings up about 95% from $0.21 a share.
That bar is already above the company’s own guide. Management guided third-quarter revenue to $2.160 billion to $2.164 billion, so consensus at $2.18 billion is asking for a beat of the guide, not just a meet. Full-year guidance on record is revenue of $8.150 billion to $8.158 billion and adjusted free cash flow of $4.5 billion to $4.7 billion. The setup comes off a strong second quarter: revenue up 93% to $1.935 billion, U.S. commercial revenue up 149% to $764 million, and adjusted earnings of $0.41 a share against $0.35 expected. The stock closed Friday at $184.11, down 6.3% that day in the tech sell-off, and was up about 1.9% premarket Monday to around $187.67. Options imply a move of about plus or minus 13.32% on the report — the biggest expected swing among tonight’s names.
Palantir fits the market’s new filter: it prints cash now. It is asset-light and free-cash-flow positive, so tonight is not a cash-burn test like the hyperscalers faced last week.
What to watch: U.S. commercial growth — and whether full-year guidance is raised again. That combination is what has carried the stock after past reports.
Caution flag: At a premium multiple, a simple beat is not enough. If commercial growth merely holds and guidance stays flat, the valuation, not the business, becomes the story — and options are pricing a double-digit move either way.
2. Apple (AAPL) — The $5 trillion report, and a new CEO’s first earnings call
Apple reports fiscal fourth-quarter results after the close today, Monday, November 2, with its call at 5:00 PM ET. Consensus is earnings of $1.98 to $1.99 a share on revenue of about $113.4 billion — revenue up about 10.7% year over year from $102.47 billion, and earnings up about 7.6% from $1.85 a share. Together, Apple and Palantir put roughly $6.3 trillion of market cap on the line tonight, about $5 trillion of it Apple alone. Apple also regained the market-cap lead over Nvidia in Friday’s pullback, when Apple fell 1.2% and Nvidia fell 4.2%.
Management’s own guide frames the quarter: revenue up 9% to 11%, gross margin of 47% to 48% including about one point of tariff refund benefit, and iPhone revenue guided to mid-teens growth. Preview estimates put iPhone revenue near $56.5 billion, Services near $31.6 billion, and Mac near $9.7 billion. This is also the first earnings call hosted by CEO John Ternus, who took over on September 1, 2026. Options imply a move of about plus or minus 4.25% — smaller than Palantir’s, but on a $5 trillion base that is still an enormous amount of value.
What to watch: December-quarter guidance — especially gross margin as memory costs climb, set against the tighter supply management has warned about across iPhone, Mac, and iPad. The September quarter is guided and largely known; the holiday-quarter guide is where the stock moves.
Caution flag: That cuts both ways. A solid September print with a soft holiday margin guide would likely be treated as a miss, because the market is buying the next quarter, not grading the last one.
3. AMD (AMD) — Tuesday’s chip verdict after Intel’s warning
AMD reports third-quarter results after the close on Tuesday, November 3 — Election Day — with its call at 5:00 PM ET. Consensus is earnings of $1.94 to $1.95 a share on revenue of about $13.08 billion to $13.09 billion, up about 41.6% year over year, with earnings up about 62% from $1.20 a share a year ago.
Management guided revenue to about $13 billion, plus or minus $300 million, and non-GAAP gross margin to about 56%. The growth engine is the data center: in the second quarter, data center revenue reached $6.7 billion, up 107% year over year, on EPYC server processors and Instinct AI accelerators, out of record total revenue of $11.5 billion. The context is what makes Tuesday matter beyond AMD itself. Intel guided its fourth quarter well below expectations last week and its stock plunged about 29% — its worst day since 1974 — dragging the chip sector with it. AMD fell 10.88% on October 30 to close at $504.80. Tuesday’s report will help settle whether Intel’s weakness was company-specific or a broader chip problem. The Street’s fourth-quarter bar is already high, at roughly $16.29 billion of revenue and about $2.68 a share, and options imply a move of about plus or minus 8.95%. Analyst support is still there into the print: Susquehanna reiterated a Buy and raised its price target to $650 from $620, citing data center demand.
What to watch: Whether data center growth accelerates as management promised for the second half, the fourth-quarter revenue guide against that roughly $16.3 billion bar, and whether gross margin can hold or top 56%.
Caution flag: AMD is not insulated from Intel’s warning — it sells Ryzen processors into the same PC market Intel flagged. A print that is merely in line, with margin below 56%, leaves a stock that was priced for acceleration with little cushion.
4. Oracle (ORCL) — Upgraded today, but its cash test is still December 9
Oracle is the non-earnings idea of the week, and it starts with a fresh upgrade: Stephens upgraded Oracle from Equal Weight to Overweight in Monday’s upgrade list. The timing matters. Deutsche Bank also turned bullish on U.S. technology stocks on Monday, reversing a downgrade from three weeks ago and saying the selloff has gone too far — more than $2 trillion was wiped off the Nasdaq-100’s market value last month, and tech and mega-cap growth lagged the rest of the S&P 500 by more than 16 percentage points over the past three weeks.
Oracle’s story is different from the cash printers above, and it should be stated plainly: Oracle is a forecast name, not a cash printer yet. At its October 28 Investor Day, the company laid out revenue of more than $225 billion by fiscal 2030, free cash flow turning positive in the second half of fiscal 2028 and reaching $30 billion or more in fiscal 2029, fundraising capped at $20 billion through 2030, and contracted backlog — remaining performance obligations — of $664 billion, with about half converting within 36 months. That contracted backlog is the bull case in one number. The bear case is also in the numbers: free cash flow was negative last quarter, debt sits around $117 billion, and the rating is BBB-.
What to watch: The first real exam is not this week’s upgrade — it is second-quarter earnings around December 9. Watch whether that $664 billion backlog holds and whether the cash burn is narrowing on the path the company just dated.
Caution flag: An upgrade after a sector sell-off is a sentiment signal, not confirmation. Oracle only fits a “cash flow is king” market as a contracted-forecast exception — if December 9 does not confirm the path, the exception gets repriced.
The bottom line: This week is the cash-flow filter applied in real time. Friday punished the AI spenders whose bills arrived before the cash did, and Monday’s futures bounce does not settle that argument — tonight’s reports start to. Palantir prints cash and faces a valuation exam, Apple prints cash and faces a holiday-guidance exam, AMD has to prove the chip sell-off was Intel’s problem and not the sector’s, and Oracle has to eventually turn a $664 billion contracted backlog into the cash it has promised by fiscal 2029. Layer the midterms on Tuesday — where gridlock is the market’s base case — and Friday’s jobs report on top, and the lesson of the week is the same in every section: beats alone are not enough anymore. Guidance, margins, and cash are what get paid.
Disclaimer: This post is for educational and informational purposes only and is not financial advice, a recommendation, or an offer to buy or sell any security. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of principal. Do your own research and consult a qualified financial professional before making investment decisions.
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