DailyBrief: April 26

Markets & Economics

Intel Stock Soars 24% in Best Day Since 1987 on Q1 Earnings Blowout
Intel shares jumped 23.6% on Friday, marking the chipmaker's best single-day performance since October 1987, after the company reported Q1 2026 adjusted earnings of 29 cents per share on revenue of $13.58 billion, sharply ahead of consensus estimates of 1 cent and $12.42 billion. Data center revenue climbed 22% to $5.1 billion as Intel began capturing AI-driven CPU demand. Management guided Q2 revenue to $13.8 to $14.8 billion, well above Wall Street's $13.07 billion estimate. Intel is now up 124% year to date and the surprise ignited a broader semiconductor rally, with AMD adding 14%, Broadcom 11%, and Nvidia 5%. Source: CNBC
Read more

---

S&P 500 and Nasdaq Close at Record Highs as Chip Rally Powers Tape
The S&P 500 rose 0.80% to 7,165.08 and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 1.63% to 24,836.60 on Friday, with both benchmarks finishing at all-time highs as Intel's blowout earnings powered a sweeping rally across chip stocks and the broader technology sector. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 0.16% to 49,230.71, weighed down by a roughly 2.4% decline in oil prices after U.S. envoys traveled to Pakistan to restart Iran talks. Wall Street's median forecast continues to call for the S&P 500 to advance 11.8% in 2026. Source: IndexBox
Read more

---

Brent Crude Holds Above $105 as U.S. Iran Talks Resume in Pakistan
Brent crude settled at $105.33 per barrel on Friday, capping a week in which the benchmark rose roughly 16% on persistent supply-risk concerns, while WTI fell more than 1% to $94.40 as traders priced in potential easing of geopolitical tensions. U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner traveled to Islamabad on April 25 to meet Iranian counterparts, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirming the visit. Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi is coordinating in Pakistan, Oman, and Russia. Markets remain caught between Strait of Hormuz shipping risks and the prospect that diplomacy could release more crude into global supply. Source: CNBC
Read more

---

Fed Set to Hold Rates Steady at April 28 to 29 Meeting Amid War-Driven Inflation
The Federal Reserve is overwhelmingly expected to keep the federal funds target range at 3.50% to 3.75% when the FOMC concludes its meeting on Wednesday, with the CME FedWatch tool pricing a 99.5% probability of no change. A Reuters poll of economists now projects no rate cut for at least another six months as Middle East war-driven energy shocks reignite inflation pressures, and futures markets are not pricing the next cut until June 2027. The IMF this month cut its 2026 global growth forecast to 3.1% and lifted its headline inflation projection to 4.4%, citing the war, tighter financial conditions, and firmer inflation expectations. Source: CNBC
Read more

---

Tech & AI

Google Commits Up to $40 Billion to Anthropic in Cash and Cloud Capacity
Alphabet's Google is investing up to $40 billion in Anthropic, the maker of Claude, deepening one of the most consequential alliances in the AI race. Google will deploy $10 billion in cash now at Anthropic's $350 billion valuation, matching February's funding round, with another $30 billion contingent on Anthropic hitting performance milestones. Google Cloud will also provide 5 gigawatts of new compute capacity over the next five years, with room to expand further. Google previously held a roughly 14% stake worth more than $3 billion. The deal positions Google as both a major financial backer and infrastructure provider for a key rival to OpenAI, even as the two companies remain partners and competitors. Source: Bloomberg
Read more

---

DeepSeek Releases V4 Model, Closing the Gap With Frontier AI Systems
Chinese AI lab DeepSeek on April 24 unveiled and open-sourced two preview versions of its long-awaited V4 model, V4 Flash and V4 Pro, both mixture-of-experts architectures with 1 million token context windows. V4 Pro carries 1.6 trillion total parameters with 49 billion active, making it the largest open-weight model available, while V4 Flash totals 284 billion parameters with 13 billion active. DeepSeek introduced a new Hybrid Attention Architecture that the company says largely closes the gap with leading proprietary models on reasoning and coding benchmarks. Pricing starts at $0.14 per million input tokens, sharply undercutting U.S. rivals. Source: TechCrunch
Read more