Intel’s stock dropped around 30% overnight, shaving some $39 billion from the company’s market capitalization since rumors of a pending layoff first emerged. The devastating results come after the chip giant reported a loss for the second quarter, complained about yield issues with the Meteor Lake CPU, provided a modest business outlook for the next few quarters, and announced plans to lay off 15,000 people worldwide.
When the NYSE closed on July 31, Intel’s market capitalization was $130.86 billion. Then, a report about Intel’s massive layoffs was published, and the company’s market capitalization dropped sharply to $123.96 billion on August 1. Following Intel’s financial report yesterday, the company’s capitalization dropped to $91.86 billion. Essentially, Intel has lost half of its capitalization since January. As of now, Intel’s market value is a fraction of Nvidia’s worth and less than half of AMD’s.
As Intel’s actions look rather desperate, analysts believe that Intel’s challenges are existential. “Intel’s issues are now approaching the existential,” Stacy Rasgon, an analyst with Bernstein, told Reuters.
They also announced they are going to stop paying stock dividends starting Q4.
Back in ye olden days, you used to buy a stock largely due to its ability to regularly pay you back a dividend, as a more conventional kind of investment, before the more modern idea of ‘buy low sell high’ became the most prevalent investment strategy / market dynamic.
I’ve always thought that stocks have to pay dividents, like that’s the whole point of having it? I.e you get paid by the company regularly some of their profit, based on how much stock you have.
Does this mean that the only way how to make money from their stock now is to sell them to someone else? But then, it has nothing to do with the actual company and money they make, but you are paid by someone totally unrelated - the guy who buys the stock from you. I don’t get it, I suppose I’m missing something.
At least for the US, yes you are correct that this was the conventional logic that governed the average joe’s investment into a stock, up until… roughly the 60s or 70s.
I am not going to write a dissertation on the history of American financial investment, but yeah nowadays, the way you invest in the stock market is … you buy a stock, hope that its value increases by more than inflation, and then sell it later for what is called a capital gain, ie, profit from the difference between the price you bought vs the price you sold.
So yes, your the second half of your post is correct:
You buy Stock A for 100 from Some Guy 1, then later you hope to be able to sell Stock A to Some Guy 2 for 150.
The specifics of this can easily get absurdly complicated with exceptionally complex and advanced math and mountains of rules and regulations, but basically, what still holds true is this:
Literally a goldfish swimming to the left or right side of a tank to indicate what stocks should be bought or sold, this outperforms the average financial ‘wizard’ on wall street making your investment decisions.
BUT, basically at no time in the past 20 or 30 years has putting your money into a bank’s savings account to earn interest managed to beat the inflation rate, so if you want a chance to actually be rewarded for setting aside money, you put it into stocks, a mutual fund, an index fund, and well if you ever need to pull some cash out for an emergency, you get fucked by fees.
What you really do is buy real estate. But you have to already have a good deal of money to do that.
Isn’t capitalism fun?
I see, stonks are way more bullshit than I thought. Is there anything else you can do with your stock, other than sell it to someone else? I always thought that crypto is such a scam especially because in the end, it has no value in itself, and the only thing you can do with it is sell it to someone else. If noone wants to buy it, well, you are fucked. Does it mean that stocks are exactly the same concept? I always thought it has something to do with the vaule of the company and the profits it earns, but if there is no way how to cash them out other than selling your piece of paper to someone, then it’s really the same? I suppose that unlike crypto, the stock price increases if the company is turning profit, but you still have to find someone to sell it to, right, so the price is increasing only because the demand from people willing to buy it is increasing due to it turning profit, but it’s not really tied to the actual value of the company, so it’s exactly like crypto? Or is the price set by some different mechanism than crypto is - pure demand from people willing to buy?
There are different types of stocks. Some stocks give you physical ownership, amusingly one time Warren Buffet accidentally bought like 300 cows once, and it was physical stock he bought. After it was realized, he had like 3 days to figure out what to do with them and ship them across the country.
Investing in a variety of types of stocks (including arguably physical stock, which is why some people buy gold) gives your portfolio some stability and diversity.
It’s hilarious how people will shit on NFTs but not non-dividend stocks that are just corporate NFTs without even a jpg of a monkey.
Nope, not even close.
NFTs are wildly, wildly more speculative investments than the stock market, having absolutely 0 solid foundation of an actual business with capital and products and services behind them, they have a proven track record of 99% of them losing 99% of their value in a year or two, and 99% of them are just outright scams.
Go watch a some Folding Ideas videos for a more in depth explanation.
After a decade plus of watching crypto currencies evolve, the only one that actually does what a crypto currency was originally supposed to do is monero, xmr: Secure, very hard to trace transactions that can be done with anonymity, provided you learn a whole bunch of opsec.