Big Tech Stocks Drop as Fed, Palantir Hurt Sentiment

Big tech stocks dropped in premarket trading on Tuesday as uncertainty over the Federal Reserve’s policy outlook and earnings from Palantir Technologies Inc. made investors more cautious.

Tesla, Intel, Broadcom, AMD, Amazon, and Alphabet fell 2%; TSMC, Nvidia, Meta, and Apple fell 1%.

A flurry of US central bank officials offered contrasting views on the outlook for further rate cuts, with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee saying he’s more concerned about inflation than the job market. Even as US factory activity contracted for an eighth straight month in October, global stocks hovered near record highs, driven by technology heavyweights and stoking calls for broader-market consolidation.

After an AI-driven run, equities are increasingly sensitive to any macro data weakness or shifts in the Fed policy path.

Wall Street chief executives said investors should brace for an equity market drop of more than 10% in the next 12 to 24 months, and that such a correction may be a positive development.

Back to Palantir, the company raised its annual revenue outlook to $4.4 billion and outpaced analyst estimates for third-quarter sales.

Investors have sent the firm’s shares up more than 150% so far this year, closing Monday at a record $207.18. The company had a price-to-sales ratio of 85 as of Friday — the highest in the S&P 500 Index.

Mandeep Singh, senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, said that investors likely wanted more guidance about the following year. Palantir gave a forecast for the current quarter, Singh said, but everyone wanted some sense of 2026, he said.

The market reaction highlights “how stretched expectations are in the AI space,” Chanana said. “A small post-print dip says more about lofty expectations than fundamentals.”