Mega-Cap Week Puts Markets on Edge

Earnings Dominate the Calendar

The week's biggest event risk is a concentrated burst of mega-cap earnings. MSFT Microsoft reports fiscal Q4 results on Wednesday after the close. The $2.8 trillion company carries outsized weight for AI sentiment across the whole market. META and TSLA also report this week. Options flow is already flashing red. Negative bets have topped positive ones in all three names. Tesla trades with an RSI of just 28 and is down 30% year-to-date. Meta draws the heaviest put volume of the mega-cap cohort.

Short Sellers at Extremes

Bears remain deeply dug in on several names. Wolfspeed hit 80% SI % of Free Float with zero shares available to borrow. Hertz sits at 75% and Chewy at 72.4%. The sharpest move of the week belongs to Columbia Financial, where SI % FF jumped 22 points in days — from 5.3% to 27.6%. That kind of sudden acceleration signals fast-moving conviction from short sellers.

Analysts Back Cyber and Industrials

Analysts lifted targets on Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike, and Comfort Systems USA while trimming across utilities. Utility names including Duke Energy and Xcel Energy absorbed small cuts. The rotation in analyst sentiment mirrors the options-driven caution toward defensive names.

Europe: Lundbergs Buy, Astera Falls

In Sweden, the Lundberg group filed purchases totalling over $92M across Sandvik and Svenska Handelsbanken — a strong vote of confidence in Nordic industrials and financials. In the US, Astera Labs dropped 11% in a single session, even as analyst targets remain well above current prices — a disconnect worth watching.