Stock Market Today: Intel's Worst Day Since 1974 Sinks the Nasdaq 2.9%

Intel had its worst day since 1974 on Friday, and it took the rest of the chip industry down with it. The Nasdaq Composite fell 2.86% to 25,437.00, its worst day since June, CNBC and the Motley Fool reported, and the S&P 500 fell 1.82% to 7,580.07. The Dow lost 1.09% to 51,770.31, and the Russell 2000 index of smaller companies fell 1.66%.

Intel’s forecast set off a chip selloff

Intel (INTC) plunged 28.6% to $65.76, its worst day since 1974, Benzinga and CNN reported. On Thursday evening it forecast fourth-quarter revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion, well short of estimates, and blamed a shortage of memory chips that is choking demand for PCs (full story).

The damage spread fast. AMD (AMD) and Qualcomm (QCOM) each fell about 11%, along with Arm and the makers of networking chips for AI data centers (full story). Nvidia (NVDA) fell 4.2% to $204.64. Benzinga put the market value lost across chip stocks at about $1 trillion.

PC and server maker Dell (DELL) plunged 10.8%, as Intel’s warning about the PC market hit hardware makers too (full story). Sandisk (SNDK) plunged 13.5% even after it beat estimates and set an 8-for-1 stock split (full story).

Worries about AI spending came back

Amazon (AMZN) said it burned through $42.4 billion of free cash flow over the past 12 months as it builds out AI capacity, and that added to the unease, Reuters and Investing.com reported. Amazon itself pared its early losses and closed down 1.4% at $240.35 (full story).

The stocks that live off AI spending fared worse. AI cloud providers Nebius (NBIS) and CoreWeave (CRWV) and web-security company Cloudflare (NET) all slid with no news of their own (full story).

The selloff closed out a bad month. The Nasdaq fell about 5.3% in October, its worst month since March 2025, Yahoo Finance and Investing.com reported.

Results sank Reddit and Illumina

Reddit (RDDT) plunged 29.2% to $91.73 after its fourth-quarter revenue forecast fell short and it warned that shrinking traffic from Google search could cut its daily users (full story). Gene-sequencing company Illumina (ILMN) plunged 18.6% even though it beat profit estimates and raised its 2026 forecast (full story).

A few stocks soared

Regeneron (REGN) soared 13.3% to $927.89, its highest close in at least a year, after third-quarter results beat estimates on sales of its eczema drug Dupixent, Yahoo Finance and Investing.com reported. Global Payments (GPN) soared 13.0% after the Financial Times reported that private-equity firm CD&R is pursuing a buyout of the payments company, a deal Yahoo Finance and Investing.com said could value it at about $40 billion. No offer has been confirmed.

Even gold and bitcoin fell

Investors sold the assets that usually hold up in a rout. Gold futures fell 3.6% to $3,884.90 an ounce, and spot gold touched its lowest level since October 2025, the Globe and Mail and Cointelegraph reported. Bitcoin fell 4.9%, also hurt by a security incident at the Binance crypto exchange, CoinDesk and Cointelegraph reported. Treasuries rose instead, pushing the 10-year yield down to 4.93%.

The numbers