IBM Plunges 25%, Drags Software Stocks — Is a Style Rotation Underway?
IBM crashed 25.21% to $217 after Q2 revenue came in at approximately $17.2B, up just 1% and missing the ~$17.86B consensus, dragging Salesforce and peers lower. More telling: IBM noted late-June clients were shifting quarterly capex toward servers, storage, and memory to lock in capacity ahead of price hikes — explaining why hardware and semiconductors rallied while software sold off. Is this an isolated earnings miss, or the opening act of a software-to-hardware rotation?