Welcome to Staten News — where a profit miss of two cents costs a company a third of its market cap and nobody blinks.
ServiceNow missed its earnings estimate by two cents. Revenue actually beat. The stock dropped 26.9% in a single session anyway.
That was the mood of the last week of October. The S&P 500 slipped 0.57% to 7,580.07, the Nasdaq lost 2.0%, and big tech spent the week getting interrogated about AI spending. Meanwhile the Russell 2000 gained 1.29% and the equal-weight S&P (RSP) put together its fourth straight up week. Translation: the average stock was fine. The giants were not.
📉 The Loser: ServiceNow (NOW), down 33.9% on the week
ServiceNow reported on October 28. Adjusted EPS came in at $1.00 against a $1.02 estimate. Revenue landed at $4.107 billion, a hair above the $4.095 billion Wall Street wanted. Subscription revenue grew 20.5% in constant currency.
None of that is a disaster. The guide was the problem.
Current remaining performance obligations, the backlog number software investors treat like a heartbeat monitor, grew 21% in the third quarter. Management guided it down to 18.5% for the fourth. Management also said early renewals pulled deals forward into Q3, which is a polite way of saying Q4 already got raided. The stock fell 26.9% on Thursday, October 29, while peers only lost somewhere between 2.8% and 7.3%.
And it wasn't alone. Fortinet dropped 24.4% on the week after trimming its service revenue forecast. Intel fell 24.4% after guiding fourth quarter revenue to $15 to $16 billion with a foundry operating loss near $1.9 billion. The market is grading software and legacy chips on the fear that AI eats their lunch, and any crack in the numbers gets treated as proof.
That's not an earnings reaction. That's a verdict on the whole business model, delivered in one trading day.
📈 The Winner: Regeneron (REGN), up 15.3% on the week
Regeneron's Friday report was the cleanest beat of earnings season so far. Total revenue jumped 36% to $5.1 billion. Non-GAAP EPS hit $20.07, up 70% from a year ago and miles past the roughly $16.19 analysts expected.
The engine is Dupixent. Global sales, which Sanofi books, rose 35% to $6.5 billion. Because Regeneron finished paying off its development balance with Sanofi in the second quarter, it now keeps its full share of those profits. Sanofi collaboration revenue jumped 68% to $2.72 billion.
Eylea HD did its part too, with U.S. sales up 62% to a record $699 million. The original Eylea dropped 41% to $400 million as biosimilars ate into it. Regeneron is basically moving its own customers to the new product before the competition gets them, and so far it's working.
Chipotle technically edged it on the weekly leaderboard at +15.9%. But Regeneron is the move with a real earnings story behind it.
🔮 This Week's Predicted Gainer: AMD
AMD reports Tuesday after the close. The Street expects about $13.1 billion in revenue and $1.94 in EPS.
Here's the thesis. Intel just told investors its next quarter looks light and its foundry is still bleeding close to $2 billion. Every dollar of data center and PC spend that doesn't trust Intel's roadmap has one obvious place to go. AMD also gets to talk about AI accelerators the week after the market punished everyone whose AI story looked shaky, which means a credible guide on GPU shipments could get rewarded hard.
The risk is real, though. Marvell fell 14% last week and memory shortages helped sink Intel. If AMD says supply constraints are capping the fourth quarter, the stock goes down with the rest of the chip trade. Possible? Absolutely. But the setup favors the company taking share, not the one losing it.
⚠️ This Week's Predicted Loser: Palantir (PLTR)
Palantir reports Monday after the close, with consensus around $0.41 in EPS on $2.18 billion in revenue. It closed Friday at $184.11.
The last report sent the stock up 29.4%. That's the problem. When a stock trades on multiples this rich, "beat and raise" is the minimum, and last week showed what happens to software names that deliver anything less than perfect. ServiceNow missed by two cents and lost a quarter of its value in a day.
Palantir has a better growth story than ServiceNow. Nobody is arguing otherwise. But the market spent last week selling software on any excuse, and Palantir is the most expensive name in the group walking into the same room.
🗓️ The Week Ahead
Monday: ISM manufacturing at 10 AM ET. Apple and Palantir after the close.
Tuesday: Midterm elections. JOLTS. AMD, Super Micro, Pfizer and Amgen report.
Wednesday: ADP and ISM services. Qualcomm, Uber, AppLovin and McDonald's report.
Thursday: Jobless claims. Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack speaks.
Friday: October jobs report at 8:30 AM ET. FactSet's consensus is about 55,000 jobs and 4.2% unemployment.
Hammack is the one to watch. She was one of two Fed officials who dissented in favor of a rate hike when the Fed held steady last week, with Brent crude sitting near $113 a barrel. If Friday's jobs number comes in hot on top of $113 oil, the hike crowd gets louder.
This is the week the market finds out whether last week's software beatdown was a correction or the start of a new rule.
Sources: Regeneron Q3 2026 release (SEC 8-K), Trefis on ServiceNow, The Glass Desk weekly review, Stocktwits week ahead
This is not financial advice. Always do your own research.
— The Bandicoots 📊🔥