Big Tech Leads The Market Higher - Market Outlook (Ep. 28)

Last week--Monday, April 20 to Friday, April 24, 2026--the stock market reached record highs, driven by a blockbuster earnings report from Intel and easing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, despite a volatile start to the week. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both secured their fourth consecutive week of gains, with the S&P 500 closing above 7,100 for the first time.  The Nasdaq was the standout performer among the indexes due to it holding most tech stocks, which were strong this week, while the Dow (which is not so tech-heavy) was the underperformer among the indexes.  This week's rally was driven by tech.  Intel jumped up 23% on Friday after beating earnings estimates and raising guidance on strong AI-driven CPU demand.  This was the best day Intel has had in 38 years (the dotcom boom) and Intel is now trading at its highest level since 2000.  This boosted the entire tech sector, with companies like Nvidia and AMD also seeing significant gains.  AMD shares surged 10% on Friday because--let's be real--anything Intel can do, AMD can probably do better.

JOIN THE COMMUNITY VIA PATREON/DISCORD:
Become a "Premium Member" by subscribing on Patreon ( https://www.patreon.com/dtoptions ).  This gets you access to the Discord, including the daily voice chats on market days, as well as access to exclusive video content posted on Patreon, including all of the daily voice chats in their entirety.

BUY DT'S BOOK
🛍️ The Super Wheel Options Strategy: https://amzn.to/3v7gAXh

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Welcome to this week's edition of Market Outlook. I am your host, Derek Taylor, also known as DT. Market Outlook is a weekly podcast where I take a look at last week in the market. As well as previewing the week ahead, I will also share with you some potential options trades that I think are interesting for this week. But first, what were the major stories in the stock market this past week? So last week, Monday, April 20th to Friday, April 24th, the stock market reached record highs, driven mainly by a blockbuster earnings report from Intel and also easing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East despite a little bit of a volatile start to the week. Monday was a little shaky, but as the week progressed, the market kind of gained its footing, and especially late in the week, the rally was on. The SP 500 and the Nasdaq both secured their fourth consecutive up week in a row, with the SP closing above 7100 for the very first time. The NASDAQ was the standout performer among the indexes due to its holding mostly tech stocks, which were strong this week, while the Dow, which is not so tech heavy, was the underperformer among the indexes. This week's rally was mainly driven by tech. Intel jumped up 23% on Friday after beating earnings estimates and raising guidance on strong AI-driven CPU demand. This was the best day Intel had had in 38 years, you know, since the dot-com boom, right? And Intel is now trading at its highest level since 2000. Think about that, right? Just uh Intel, ever since the dot-com boom and then the dot-com burst, Intel has kind of languished for decades. It hasn't done anything. And all of a sudden, this crazy run up. Uh if you'd have bought shares of Intel a year ago, you'd look like a genius right now. And this strong earnings report by Intel really boosted the entire tech sector, with companies like Nvidia and AMD also seeing significant gains. AMD shares surged 10% on Friday because let's be real, anything that Intel can do, AMD probably can do better. So after a shaky start to the week where concerns over the US-Iran conflict kind of weighed on the market, those tensions eased as the week progressed. And then we had a three-week extension of a ceasefire between Israel and Lebanon that was announced by President Trump during the week, and that kind of calmed fears of oil supply disruptions and it brought volatility down, especially in oil, but also in the overall stock market. Broadly speaking, the earnings season, which has just started, but already a number of companies have already reported, and over 80% of those companies are exceeding expectations. So uh, especially in some of the sectors like financials and industrials, we're seeing good performance with the earnings, which that kind of offsets some of the concerns about high inflation. Also, speaking of inflation, investors were also monitoring the confirmation hearing of Kevin Walsh as the new Fed chair. Overall, this past week was a definite win for the Bulls. It wasn't a crazy straight up to the moon kind of week like the previous three weeks were, but this week it was definitely the bulls are in the driver's seat, right? And I think we are now probably entering a period where we get a much more normal kind of market. So a market that tends to slowly stair step up its way higher, a market where volatility mostly contracts rather than expands. And that kind of a market is rather easy to make money in. Just carry some long deltas, keep your size in check, trade the right kinds of products. So no need to speculate on meme stocks and pump and dump plays, and you know, don't do any of that in this kind of market. Just get along the major mega cap tech stocks and the major index and sector ETFs and just ride the wave up. So let's jump into the charts and see what the major indexes did last week. So let's start with the SPX, the SP 500 index. So the SPX, if I zoom in, if we take a look at the close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, we see a gain of about 39 points. That is a 0.5% gain. So you gain half a percent on the week in SPX. That's a nice solid up week, but that's not the week the NDX had. Look at the NDX. This was a much bigger move up because obviously the NASDAQ is much more tech heavy. Of the NASDAQ 100, something like 60 to 65 names in this index are tech, right? Where the SP 500 is a much broader representation of the overall market as far as it has uh stocks of all the 11 major sectors. Uh it's much more diversified compared to the tech heavy NASDAQ. But the NASDAQ week over week saw a gain of about 2.4% on the week. It gained 631 points on the week from close of the previous Friday to close of this past Friday. A monster week in the Nasdaq. Taking a look at the other major indices, let's take a look at the RUT, the Russell 2000 index. And the Russell really didn't do too much. We look at close of the previous Friday to close of this past Friday. It's a very small gain of about 10 points. That's about a um that's about a half a percent move. That's very similar to the SPX, actually. And the DJX, which is the Dow Jones index. Now, the Dow is only 30 stocks, and there's not a lot of tech in it. And because of that, the the Dow was definitely the underperformer this week because it actually finished down on the week. If we take a look at close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, it actually finished down about half a percent. And then finally, let's take a look at the volatility index, the VIX, which is the SP 500 volatility. And you can see after months of volatility expanding because of geopolitical tensions, rising inflation, and all kinds of other concerns, right? The market here in the last you know three, four weeks has really kind of calmed down, right? Volatility has just been sucked out of this market. And because of that, uh, you know, that's why the market is going up. Oddly enough, though, if I take a look at the VIX here, close of the uh previous Friday, you can see we had a big gap on Monday with volatility. And you know, from Friday to Friday here, the VIX was actually up on the week. It actually had a gain of $1.23. That's a 7% gain in the VIX, but I think that's a little misleading because uh this gap between Friday and Monday. For one thing, um, there was an expiration last week in the VIX. I just think rolling from one expiration to the next caused a little bit of this rise in volatility. But after Monday, you can see volatility did nothing. It went nowhere. If anything, it was down slightly if we take a look up, if we take a look at it Monday through Friday. So overall, uh again, I think that rise in the VIX is a little misleading. Let's take a look at some of the sector ETFs. So let's take a look at the tech sector. So I'm gonna pull up XLK, which is the tech sector ETF, which has just been on a monster run, all right? Tech has led the way up, right? Tech always kind of leads the market higher. When the market is booming, it's usually because of tech. And XLK last week saw a gain of 3.8% on the week, and just a monster gain for the tech sector. If we take a look at the energy sector, now this one's probably gonna surprise some people, but if we look at close of the previous Friday to close of this past Friday, the energy sector was up 3.4%. But wait, I thought things in the Middle East were starting to settle down, you know, oil prices are coming down, oil volatility is coming down. Typically, that's gonna be bad for oil-related companies, such as what's part of XLE, the energy sector. But you know, it wasn't a bad week for energy stocks. They actually gained 3.4% on the week. If I move over to one of the uh industry ETFs, so the home builders, so home builders is not a uh major sector, it's an industry within one of the major sectors, though. But the home builders was very strong. If we take a look at close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, it saw a gain of 1.1%. XLP, which is consumer staples, is a major market sector. Consumer staples typically underperforms when the market is doing well and outperforms when the market is doing bad. But this week, consumer staples did okay. Week over week, it was up right around 1%. And really, those four sectors slash industry ETFs are about the only things that had positive weeks: tech, energy, home builders, and consumer staples. Everything else was either unchanged or down on the week. Let's start with two sectors that were basically unchanged on the week. XLB, which is your basic materials sector, it finished the week essentially unchanged. If I take a look at XLU, which is the utilities sector, it has a very similar chart. If we take a look at the close of the uh previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, it is essentially unchanged as well. And then finally, let's go ahead and talk about the big movers to the downside. XBI, which is the uh biotech industry ETF, XBI saw a decline of 4% on the week, a pretty steep drop, but XBI has been on a tear for about a year now, right? This chart is just a crazy looking chart. It's just straight up and to the right. So, you know, pretty nasty week this week, but uh uh a really minor blip in an otherwise outstanding looking chart if you're a bull. XLV, which is the healthcare sector, which um we just looked at biotech. So you would assume that the broader uh healthcare sector probably didn't have a great week, and it didn't. Healthcare was down 3.1%. XLC, which is the communications sector ETF, and you know, this one is a little strange to me because uh the communications sector ETF does contain two of the big megacap tech stocks, and it includes Meta and Google, and both of those had pretty good weeks, and uh but but that wasn't enough to hold up the communication sector ETF because XLC saw a decline of 3% on the week. XLF, which is the financial sector, saw a decline of 2% on the week. XLRE, which is the real estate sector ETF, saw a decline of 1.5% on the week. XLY, which is consumer discretionary, this saw a decline of 1.4% on the week. And XRT, which is the retail sector ETF, saw a decline of 1.3% on the week. And then finally, industrials, XLI, this saw a decline of about 0.6% on the week. So, you know, of the 11 major market sectors, like three of them had an up week, two were kind of uh unchanged, and then the rest were negative on the week. So kind of strange when you see all of those sectors that had negative weeks, even though the broader overall market, the indices like the SPX and the NDX were up on the week. But of course, the indexes, especially the the NASDAQ, especially, but also the SP 500, because they're weighted by market cap, and the biggest companies by market cap are tech companies, right? When tech makes a big move, that can overshadow some of the weakness in the other sectors. So let's take a look at what some of the big like mega cap tech stocks did this past week. And a lot of times I would take a look at some of the mag 7 type stocks, and I will, but let's start with one that's not really a mag 7 or a mag 10 kind of stock. But heck, the way it's been performing lately, it might be added to the list at some point. Let's start with INTC, which is Intel. Intel, look at this crazy gap up on uh Friday. So Intel reported after the bill on Thursday last week and then just had a monster gain. This thing was actually up nearly 30% at one point on Friday. So this was one that a lot of people got hurt on for earnings because, you know, a lot of people, instead of being just long as far as being bullish with short puts, long calls, long shares, you know, a lot of people were probably trading this with things like strangles, iron condors. Some people were just selling naked calls, you know, just trying to be a contrarian because this thing was out of control to the upside. And anybody that had a naked call on this thing just got run over, right? And then they lost their ass off. And there's not much you could have done about it, right? That's the thing with earnings reports. Earnings reports are kind of random events anyway, because whether the earnings are good earnings or bad earnings, you never know how the market reacts. Sometimes a company will will report great earnings and the stock goes down 30%. They'll report the worst earnings they've ever had, the stock goes up 30%. You never really know how the market will react to this kind of stuff. So earnings are a little bit random. So be careful when you're trading earnings. Try to imagine your worst case scenario on an earnings play. And for me, typically, worst case scenario, I try to imagine what would happen if the stock went up or down by 25 to 30%. Because that's realistic. You know, and that happens on occasion, like what happened with Intel here. And imagine what that would do to your current position, right? Imagine that loss. Can you stomach that loss? If the answer is yes, then maybe you keep the trade on. If the answer is no, maybe you get out of that trade. Take that trade off right before earnings. And then after earnings, if you want to get back into the trade you were in, just put it back on right after the earnings. But sometimes holding those uh naked short puts and naked short calls through an earnings event will get you hurt. So a crazy week for Intel, obviously. Uh, if I zoom out, the chart for Intel over the last seven or eight months is insane. I mean, this thing was trading below $20 a share in August of last year, right? And this is this is crazy. It was trading below $20, and now it's trading at $82 and a half. Just an insane move. Now, here's the thing because Intel is in the tech sector, specifically uh kind of a chip name, kind of an AI-related name as well. As soon as Intel had this kind of move, you know, some of the other companies like AMD also made monster moves in sympathy because well, I mentioned it at the top of the show. AMD, if we're being honest, AMD is a better company, it's a better chip manufacturer, it just does everything better than Intel, right? So, hey, if Intel's doing well, well, hell, let me buy some AMD, and that's exactly what people did on Friday. If you look at the chart of AMD for the last month, I mean, it is almost an upside-down waterfall, right? This is like a parabolic up move that AMD has made. It has gone from under $200 a share to $347 a share in about three weeks. Just an insane move. If you'd bought shares of AMD about three weeks ago, you'd look like a genius right now. Nvidia also had a nice week, just like the rest of the semiconductors, it kind of popped on Friday. Nvidia finished the week up about 3.3%. By the way, AMD finished the week up 25% because of that crazy up move on Friday. Some other chip and memory-related names. MU, Micron, which has been on a monster run for a while now. Micron finished the week up about 9% on the week. Amazon, which reports earnings next week, it had a gain of 5.4% on the week. AVGO, which is Broadcom, had a gain of 4% on the week. If we move over to Apple, Apple kind of underperformed this week. Apple really didn't go anywhere. If we look at the close of the uh previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, it was up, but up about 0.3%, kind of a nothing gain considering the strength of the overall tech sector. Apple really kind of underperformed this week. If we move over to Google, Google also didn't do too much week over week. If we take a look at the close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, Google was up about 0.8%. And then Microsoft was another one that kind of it had an up week, but just a small little up week. It was up about 0.4% on the week. Now, naturally, not every tech stock had a great week. Not every tech stock had a week like Intel and AMD. There were some that actually finished down on the week. Let's start with Coinbase. Coinbase is a little unique because it's crypto related, but you know, crypto has been strong recently. But Coinbase underperformed a little bit this past week. Coinbase was down about 3.2% on the week. So not a great week for Coinbase. Netflix also has been underperforming the rest of the tech sector. It had a big drop on earnings, but that drop has continued. A lot of times you get a little bit of a follow-through on these uh gap up and downs. When a stock makes a really big gap up or really big gap down on earnings, a lot of times for a little while after that, there is some follow-through for a week or two, and then maybe you'll get a reversal. But right now, you know, that trend lower continues in Netflix. It was down about 5% this past week. Meta also sadly underperformed, right? Meta was down about 2% on the week. Palantir also underperformed. Palantir was down about 2.3% on the week. And then the final negative performer, um, Tesla, one of the Mag 7 stocks. Tesla had a really ugly week. Tesla was down 6.1% on the week. So definitely the biggest loser on the week, uh, especially considering what the other mag 7 type stocks were doing. So let's move over to some of the futures and commodities. Let's start with crude oil. I'm gonna take a look at USO. So USO uh it had a gain of 14.1% on the week. So a big move up in crude oil, but crude oil is off its highs. If I take a look at the CL M6 contract, the CL futures here, uh, we are well off of their highs. Uh, this thing was trading above $100 a barrel. It got all the way up to 104 and change at one point a few weeks back. Right now, CL is trading at $94.88 a barrel, but it definitely did increase because we got down to a low uh last Friday, the previous Friday, of $78 a barrel. Uh $78 and change. So definitely an increase in oil prices this past week, but it was uh it wasn't a crazy up move, and it is hanging out in its typical range that we've been in for more than a month now. We've we've kind of hung out in that $85 to $100 a barrel kind of range. So this is not really spooking the market anymore. When we first, you know, had this huge up move into this range. That spooked the market right now. This is kind of normal pricing these days for CL. Let's move over to natural gas. I'm gonna take a look at the NG futures, uh, or we could take a look at UNG, the natural gas etf. Either one, though, is going to show you that netty gas uh had a decline on the week of about 5%, 4.9% decrease in natural gas pricing. If we move over to the crypto markets, I'm gonna take a look at Ethereum. Let's pull up ETHA, the Ethereum ETF. And if we take a look at the close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, it's actually down substantially. Ethereum was down 4.7%, although it is trading in its standard kind of range here that we've been in for a little while. Although I would say overall, Ethereum has definitely been drifting higher long term. I think you know now is the time to uh maybe start nibbling on the bullish side in both Ethereum and in Bitcoin, iBit. Similar kind of chart, although technically iBit finished positive on the week. Close of the previous Friday to the close of this past Friday, it was up 0.2%, but its chart looks very similar. If you zoom out a little bit, it and Ethereum both kind of trade uh in correlation, pretty high correlation between the two products. And they both, to me, especially in the last month, look like they're they're primed to go higher. I would not mind selling some puts in a product like iBit to get long. Let's take a look at some of the precious metals. I'm gonna pull up GLD, which is the gold ETF. GLD finished the week down 2.8% on the week, and that's unfortunate because I had a uh bullish position in GLD that expired this past week. It was a max loser because his GLD did not go up on the week. So obviously, when you're directional, you need to get direction right, and I did not. Silver, I'm also bullish in silver had a drop of 6.6% on the week, and I have some shares plus a strangle on in SLV. Yeah, I have a hundred shares, plus I have a short put, plus I have two short calls. Overall, things have been okay. I've been trading uh a lot of these covered strangles in SLV the last couple of months, and it's been working out down a little bit on the shares, but the options have worked out great. I don't think I've lost on a short put or a short call in SLV in any of these positions I've been trading for the last two or three months. So covered strangles have been great in this product. Let's move over to the currencies. Let's pull up UUP, which is the dollar index ETF. UUP finished the week up about 0.4%. On the week. So the dollar was strong. And if the dollar was strong, that means things like the euro should be weak. So let's pull up FXE, which is the Euro ETF. And we can see that the Euro was down about 0.4% on the week. So yeah, that tracks, right? If the dollar is up 0.4%, chances are the euro is down about that same amount. Other big components of the dollar index are the British pound. And let's see what it did on the week. The British pound was actually up a little bit. The British pound was up 0.2%. And the last major component of the dollar index is the Japanese yen. And the Japanese yen finished the week down 0.6% down on the week for the Japanese yen. And one final product to take a look at. Let's take a look at bonds. I'm going to pull up TLT, which is the 20-plus year Treasury bond ETF. Bonds had a nasty week and they were down 0.4% on the week. Let's talk a little bit about earnings for this upcoming week because we have a ton of earnings coming up, right? We're in the thick of earnings season. So Monday before the bell, Verizon and Domino's Pizza both report. You can't play those for earnings unless you already had a trade-on because they report before the bell on Monday. So after the bell Monday, no real companies of note, nothing worth mentioning because we've got so many good companies to play. You know, Monday after the bill, I wouldn't worry about any of the stocks reporting that day. But Tuesday before the bill, UPS, Spotify, Corning, Coca-Cola, British Petroleum, General Motors all report before the bill on Tuesday. Tuesday after the bill, Robin Hood, Bloom Energy, STX, Visa, Inphase, Starbucks, T-Mobile all report after the bell on Tuesday. Before the bell on Wednesday, SoFi, Ad V and Car, that's Avis Reynolds, which has been of a bit of a meme stock. This is one, you know, be careful if you're going to play that thing. Defined risk and really small. For me, I avoid meme stocks because you can only get hurt. Those things are only going to bring pain. Wednesday after the bell, and this is where we get into some really big earnings events, because Wednesday after the bell is probably the biggest earnings day of the season, of the entire season. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft. Four of the Mag 7 all report together. Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, also Qualcomm, Chipotle, Ford, Carvana, all report after the bell on Wednesday. Thursday before the bell, you have Caterpillar, Coniko Phillips, Eli Lilly, MasterCard, Wayfair, Altria, Merck, and Bristol Meyer all report Thursday before the bell. Thursday after the bell, Apple, Sandisc, Reddit, WDC, Rivian, Fur Solar, Riot, all report after the bell on Thursday. Friday before the bell, Chevron and ExxonMobil both report before on Friday. Also, Moderna reports before the bell on Friday. And then Friday after the bell, nothing of note reporting. So let's talk about some trade ideas for the week. One of the obvious ones is Intel. And the reason I say Intel is because Intel made such a huge up move. It actually had volatility increase rather than decrease. Just because a lot of times when something goes up, a stock goes up, volatility decreases. But when you have like a 25 or 30 percent up move, right, that actually increases volatility because that's a problem for people that were short the stock. So this thing still has an IV rank after earnings of 81. So naturally, you know, when you see something with really juicy IV, you're probably thinking, well, go sell a strangle. You can go sell a 13 delta put in the uh June cycle, and you know they're gonna have to add some strikes. Well, you know what? I'd go sell a strangle probably, but there's no calls yet. Uh on Monday, they'll add some new calls because they have to add new strikes because the stock moved up so far they've got to add more calls. But even just selling a put, like the 16 delta put, which I sold actually on Friday. I already got into the put side. I may add some calls at some point, but I sold a 16 delta put. You get a 217 credit for that 16 delta put on a buying power reduction of only $650. Hell, if you just want to get long or possibly run the wheel on Intel, selling that put, yeah, that makes all the sense in the world to me. Another stock that has already reported earnings and still has some good IV, Carnival Cruise Lines, CCL. And it's a low price stock, only $27 a share, perfect for small accounts. This is one good IV, no earnings, low price stock. Go sell a strangle. I'm already in a strangle, I've been in for a little while, but if you're not in one, go sell, go sell the 19 Delta put and the 18 Delta call in the June cycle. You get a 121 credit on a buying power reduction of only $230. All right, you don't see risk reward like that very often. And you know, because it's a low-price stock, it's not a terribly volatile stock as far as it doesn't tend to make like crazy moves. But if it did, you know, what are you looking at? You know, uh potentially a two to three hundred dollar loss, maybe if it blows through one of your strikes. I like it. I don't think Carnival Cruise Lines, you're not gonna wake up one day and it's trading at $10 a share or uh $40 a share. I it's not gonna make some kind of move like that. And on the put side, since it's such a low-priced stock, maybe just take shares if the put becomes in the money, right? Just start the wheel. But I I like the strangle here. I think uh as far as something that's reasonably safe and you're getting good premium, you know, you get getting good reward to take the risk. I like this trade. And then one other trade I want to mention because I did mention it earlier SLV Silver has an IV rank of 35. Silver is not a company, right? You don't have to worry about earnings. Go into the June cycle and because of the juicy IV, sell a one-standard deviation strangle. So I would sell the 16 Delta put, and then let me scroll up and find the 16 Delta call. I get a 237 credit on a buying power reduction of 627. All signs point to go on that trade. So that's it for this week's edition of Market Outlook. For those listening to the audio version of the podcast on Apple or on Spotify, please give the show a five-star rating. Help us grow in the algorithms. For those watching the video podcast on YouTube, check the description for my book, The Super Wheel Option Strategy. The Super Wheel Option Strategy, this book is about one of my favorite option strategy, the wheel option strategy. That book is published on Amazon. You'll find a link in the description below. Also, I have a members only Discord channel. If you subscribe to the DT Options Patreon, you are granted access to my members only Discord channel where Monday through Friday, every day that the stock market is open, I hold a live voice chat. We get together, I share my screen, you get to see all the trades I'm in, you get to see any new opening trades, closing trades, roles that I make. Uh, we get to bounce ideas off of each other, trade ideas off of each other. We've got a nice little trading community there, and we'd love to have you as well. So check out DT Options on Patreon to subscribe. All right, guys, peace.