So IBM just had its worst day since 1968. Stock down 25%. Why? They preannounced earnings, basically warning everyone before the actual July 22 call. Missed on EPS ($2.93 vs $3.02 expected) and revenue ($17.2B vs $17.86B expected). Preannouncing itself is a tell. You don't do that unless the news can't wait. The real issue: CEO Arvind Krishna said clients are pulling money out of IBM's core business (mainframes, software) and putting it into AI servers, storage, and memory instead, trying to beat price hikes from the memory shortage. IBM saw some of this coming but badly underestimated the size of it. That's why the market punished it so hard. Not "IBM had a rough quarter." More like "AI infrastructure spending is eating IBM's core business faster than expected." Scarier story for a stock whose whole pitch is stability. Not just IBM either. Oracle, Accenture, Microsoft are all in the red YTD. IBM just took the hardest single-day hit of a trend already hitting the whole sector.(Lark Davis)