Stocks Brace for Midterms, Apple Earnings and Jobs Data After Tech Sell-Off

NEW YORK, Nov. 2 (TodayViralUSA) — Wall Street heads into one of its busiest weeks of the year with tech stocks bruised, as investors weigh the midterm elections, earnings from Apple, AMD and Palantir, and the October jobs report.

U.S. stock futures edged higher Sunday evening after a losing week. S&P 500 futures rose about 0.3% and Nasdaq-100 futures about 0.4%, CNBC reported.

A rough end to October for tech

The Nasdaq Composite fell 2% last week and the S&P 500 and Dow each lost less than 1%. On Friday alone, the S&P 500 sank 1.8% and the Nasdaq 2.9%, Reuters reported, after disappointing results from Alphabet and Amazon and a plunge of nearly 29% in Intel shares.

The Nasdaq and S&P 500 both ended October with losses, with the Nasdaq posting its worst month since March 2025, while the Dow gained almost 2% as investors moved into defensive sectors such as healthcare.

The selling reflected growing doubts about the payoff from the huge spending on artificial intelligence. Alphabet and Microsoft gave lower-than-expected capital spending forecasts, and Amazon left its full-year guidance unchanged. Alphabet shares fell 13% after the company missed on revenue and profit. Still, Amazon’s AWS cloud unit grew 40% to $45.9 billion in revenue, beating estimates. “This was an expectations correction and not a fundamentals correction,” Evercore ISI analyst Mark Mahaney wrote of Amazon.

The week’s calendar

• Monday: Apple and Palantir report after the bell, along with Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Marriott and Roku. The ISM manufacturing index for October is also due.
• Tuesday: Election Day. AMD, Amgen, Pfizer, Shopify and Marathon Petroleum report, and the government releases September job openings data.
• Wednesday and Thursday: Results from Toyota, ConocoPhillips, Arm Holdings, McDonald’s and Qualcomm, among others.
• Friday: The October nonfarm payrolls report, expected to show a gain of 55,000 jobs, according to economists polled by Dow Jones.

Earnings still strong, but the bar is high

More than 100 S&P 500 companies report this week. With over half of the index’s members already reported, third-quarter earnings were on pace to rise 31.6%, according to LSEG data cited by Reuters. But investors have been punishing results that fall short of lofty expectations. “The earnings bar is very high,” said Chris Galipeau of the Franklin Templeton Institute. “And if you miss or don’t jump over that bar, you’re in trouble.”

Elections and oil in focus

Democrats are expected to win control of the House on Tuesday, while the Senate remains uncertain, CNBC noted. The result could shape the outlook for AI regulation and other policy, though Horizon’s Mike Dickson wrote that stocks “tend to stay steady regardless of which party gains control of Congress.”

Oil remains elevated. U.S. crude futures fell more than 1% to about $102 a barrel Sunday night and Brent to about $112, after crude rose more than 10% in October.