Technicals — Gapped below every average (20-day $272, 50-day $262, 200-day $275) to a fresh 52-week low at $211.03, then lost another 2.7% on 2.27x volume. An RSI-29 bounce can come any time, but everything below $230 — the gap's lower rim — is broken structure.
Fundamentals — The warning's substance is uglier than the drop: revenue up just 1%; customers diverted budgets from software to scarce AI hardware as memory and server prices squeezed IT wallets; several large deals slipped; and Krishna admitted Anthropic's Mythos release froze big contracts while clients rethink architectures — AI is both IBM's story and its assassin.
News — Preliminary Q2 numbers dropped premarket on 7/14 with a 'worse than our expectations' warning; the 25.2% collapse erased ~$67B of value, eclipsing the 1987 record. Street targets are being cut in batches while the options market buzzes with oversold-bounce structures. The full report lands 7/22.
Position post-mortem: the $275 stop was gapped through at the 7/14 open and the exit executed at the open per discipline — this long settles at a heavy loss. Lesson archived: into any event window (earnings or warnings), event positions get halved, never carried at full size overnight.
The Red Hat/consulting cash flows and the Anderon quantum option still exist, but budget crowd-out by AI hardware is structural and industry-wide; wait for the 7/22 full report and guidance before repricing.
- Software demand persistently crowded out by AI hardware
- Slipped deals turning into cancellations
- Capex strain from quantum/advanced-node bets
- 07-14Long$290.23 → closed $211.207-16-27.23%
- WSB · Mentions collapsed from 1,132 to 243 — the whole board talked about it the night before the crash, nobody knows it after; retail attention is the fastest stop-loss there isOriginal ↗