Top 10 Stocks to Watch — Thursday, July 23: Capex on Trial

It is the deepest day of the Q2 earnings season, and the market is being forced to price the question that has hung over 2026 all year: is the spending working? Alphabet and Tesla both reported after Wednesday's close and both are lower pre-market — not because the quarters were bad, but because investors are re-examining what all that capital expenditure is buying. Intel prints tonight and answers the same question from the other direction. Meanwhile the defense complex is quietly beating and raising, and copper just printed an all-time high.

S&P 500 futures sit slightly lower (around 7,521, off roughly 0.3%) with Nasdaq futures down a similar amount ahead of the open. The 10-year Treasury yield has ticked up to about 4.66%. Gold has slipped to roughly $4,095 an ounce and silver is off near 2%, while copper trades at a record near $6.47 a pound on a supply squeeze, and WTI crude is firm around $90. The tape's dominant thread is not macro data today — it is the single densest wave of large-cap earnings on the calendar, and how the market chooses to interpret capex, backlogs, and margins.

That makes today a reaction tape. The names below are ranked by how much fresh, dated catalyst is driving them right now — earnings that just crossed the wire, prints landing tonight, and one commodity story running on its own clock. Every level mentioned is a scenario to watch, not a call. This is a watchlist, not advice.

1. Alphabet ($GOOGL) — capex on trial

Last: ~$342, down about 1.5% pre-market (prior close $347.15). Alphabet beat, but the stock is lower as investors scrutinize an ever-rising capital-expenditure plan pouring into AI infrastructure. The bear read is that spending is compressing free cash flow; the bull read, articulated by Wedbush as it added Alphabet to its Best Ideas List with a $445 target, is that the same capex is the moat. That tension is the whole story.

Watch for: whether dip-buyers defend the post-earnings zone or the capex-as-drag narrative pulls it lower. The reaction here sets the tone for every hyperscaler.

2. Intel ($INTC) — tonight's binary

Last: ~$102.62, down about 2.7% pre-market (prior close $105.45). No stock on today's tape carries more binary risk. Intel has staged one of the market's most remarkable turnarounds, up roughly 354% over the past year on new leadership, foundry traction, and AI optimism — and it reports after the close tonight. Reuters framed it plainly: the results will test whether the AI-fueled rally "has room to run." Separately, SK Hynix denied reports it is in talks to buy Intel's Ohio campus.

Watch for: foundry commentary and forward guidance tonight. After a 3.5x run, the bar is high — this is a position-sizing and volatility event, not a quiet print.

3. Lockheed Martin ($LMT) — the beat nobody is arguing with

Last: ~$514, up about 1.4% pre-market (prior close $507.09). Lockheed crossed the wire this morning with a clean beat: Q2 EPS of $7.94 versus $7.20 expected, revenue of $20.06 billion against $19.33 billion, sales up 11% year over year, and a record $230 billion backlog. Management is also leaning hard into space as central to future warfighting — a structural tailwind on top of the quarter.

Watch for: whether the pre-market gap holds through the open. A record backlog is the kind of number that invites follow-through if the broader tape cooperates.

The rest of this briefing — entries 4 through 10 — is for paid members.