Set, Go! – New year, clean slate
9. January 2026
Tian Xuan Zhou (Oliver)
Bachelors Student, New European College – Munich
2024 was an abysmal year for Intel. Declining revenues, competitive losses paired with structural and leadership changes saw stock plunged ~60%. Most importantly, the fierce competition in AI/data center chips with AMD and Nvidia dwarfed Intel. Sentiment was poor.
I started monitoring Intel in the middle of 2024 and started covering it on the 30th of December 2024, where I initiated my Intel long position. The stock price was $19.23 per share at the close.
The initial idea was that sentiment was so poor that a rebound was inevitable. I would like to think that quant traders like to cluster around prices that are nice and full, like $20 per share, because I know that this is the case with some tech stocks such as TSLA so it was fairly short term.
However, it remains fairly underwhelming for the next couple of weeks. January 17 saw a gap up before, once again, stock price was dragged back down. However looking at the graph now, it seems like they were short sellers covering their positions.
It was also around this time that their newly released ARC B580 graphics card had many user reviews, and from what I have read in the internet, it was surprisingly positive. Furthermore, there was news about them selling off their foundry leg, which was losing them significant amounts of money.
At this point, in my mind, I had confidence in Intel to turn around, but what about the market and sentiment? Rather volatile, although the graph seemed to have some sort of structure, fluctuating at the same price ranges.
February saw a small run due to belief that the U.S. government would back domestic semiconductor production. However since it was more speculation and sentiment rather than fundamentals, it came back down at the end of the month. Much of the same with March that year. BUT, the idea is important, it seems like the Trump administration was pushing hard for domestic production not just on chips and semiconductors.
It took until July until I covered Intel again going into the Q2 earnings report. As I am heavy on fundamentals, I knew the results were not going to be good. It will take time for a company to turn around. Rather simple and common sense argument. However, the Q2 earnings report saw a beat on revenue. There was still life and I think where sentiment really shifted.
15th of August, 2025. Speculation that the Trump administration is considering taking a stake in Intel, and on the 22nd of August the U.S. government acquired a 9.9 percent ownership stake in Intel by purchasing 433.3 million shares of Intel common stock at $20.47 per share, totaling about $8.9 billion.
Huge news, but no reaction. Weird, I was expecting a much bigger reaction out of the market. So my initial thought was to buy more! Premium price! But after a few days, it’s still rather flat.
Now the huge jump on the 18th of September was a rather pleasant suprise. Intel announced a major strategic partnership and funding from Nvidia. I was never really expecting a partnership between the two chip makers. It was then I knew that this was a good long that I should keep holding.
Did I expect the stock price to rally so high as of late? Absolutely not. Heading into results this week, my advice would be to sell before Thursday. Stock price already closed lower last Friday down by 2.81%, which I think is also investors profit taking and anticipating that results are still rather poor. I would look to buy the stock back at around $40 as I firmly believe in the company to turn around and succeed.
On a different note, I would like to give an opinion on the banking sector. Mr. Trump is calling for a cap on credit card rates. There are trades ever since Mr. Trump was re-elected called Trump always chickens out, the TACO trade and I think this is one of them.
I think this will either be blocked as a bill or they would realise that the banking sector will perform so poorly because how on earth will a lot of American citizens get a credit card if the financial sectors just stop lending, unless they want to lend out money on a loss? Rather ridiculous. that they just move onto more important topics as a whole and drop the cap.
So on that note, buying back into the financial sector picking the biggest losers last week, such as Capital one or Charles Schwab (which if you scroll down a little I am long for a while) reporting Wednesday, with their 14% CAGR[1] outpacing the company’s earnings growth over the same five-year period, is a good idea I think.
[1] Compound Annual Growth Rate
