IBM is on pace for its worst day ever | Hacker News Reader

IBM is on pace for its worst day ever

cnn.com

48 points1970-01-0159 comments

Don't forget when it comes to things like this - if in this case IBM ever had an astoundingly good day, CNN would never write an article about it, and you'd never see it on HN. They choose the picture of reality to install in the reader's minds by selectively choosing what news to report on vs. what to ignore.

It's often interesting to see what the major US news orgs - right and left - are choosing to share with their readers. You see two completely different versions of reality.

Are there significant left-leaning major news orgs in the US (genuine question) ?

Left-leaning and major? No. Considering the countries that the US is compared to, there's not really a centre-leading major news source, either.

CNN is pretty far left and kind of major.

You only think this because the Overton window has shifted so far to the right that the center right CNN appears far left because of how far right the ruling party is.

Wow ... CNN is definitively not left-leaning. It fully buys into the capitalist ideal. It's more like neoliberal. That's not what I had in mind when I said "left".

I don’t understand this comment—

“Don't forget when it comes to things like this…”

Financial news?

“…if in this case IBM ever had an astoundingly good day, CNN would never write an article about it, and you'd never see it on HN.”

You have a private idea about the way the world works, but you’re not sharing a hint of the editorial decisions you believe are in effect.

> “They choose the picture of reality to install in the reader's minds by selectively choosing what news to report on vs. what to ignore”

Failing to express your ideas of why the editorial choices are suspect, I venture to wonder on your concept of communication itself.

All writing is selective—choosing a subject and the interpretive community you are writing for.

Meanwhile, your comment is itself an unsubstantiated warning message to this community.

Hmm. Almost as if the accusation is a confession.

The press release: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2026-07-14-Arvind-Krishnas-Letter-t...

With the caveat that I work for IBM but have no inside knowledge about anything important, it doesn't seem very bad to me? Overall profit is going to be down a tiny amount below expectations.

If I read that as an IBM investor I might fully exit. The new product flopped, growth was 1%, and the CEO sounds extremely unconfident. There are way better places to put your money given the potential for future earnings now looks incredibly weak.

Where would you put your money? Everything in the US seems to have exposure to the AI bubble. Is Europe sitting out of the AI race? Maybe some euro etf?

I'd like to know the answer as well. VTWO tracking the Russell 2000? At least you know it's an ETF that doesn't contain the big AI players.

I work in early stage venture so that’s my primary investment focus given the outsized potential. I do have a target date 401k and a professionally managed portfolio as well (broad across asset, sector, geography) but I don’t really focus on those.

US recession will spread to everything and everyone, including or especially EU.

COMEX is running lower on silver, their dumping is not sustainable. Could hit $500, $5000.

The EPS was a lot lower than expectation though - and I thought that was the only reason people held IBM shares, they've not traditionally grown quickly but IBM has traditionally done anything it could to get a good EPS. The other more techy side is to think that a year or so ago when everyone was climbing on AI, people were buying stocks in lots of tech companies to ride that wave; some companies (Nvidia, Samsung, Micron etc) are making a fortune from it. IBM? It's got some things it can point to it's doing in AI but it's not the big beneficiary of this wave.

>In the last few weeks of June, we saw clients shift their quarterly capex spend toward servers, storage, and memory purchases to secure supply-constrained infrastructure ahead of expected price increases. This dynamic impacted client buying patterns. While we anticipated some supply chain related impact in our expectations, we did not anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization. In addition, clients were distracted with rapidly-evolving, industry-wide cybersecurity concerns in the quarter.

Well, the answer is in your question, it's all about expectations ; the market wanted more, didn't get it, and re-rates.

Sure, but a prediction made 3 months ago turns out to be short by a few percent at most, and that leads to a 25%+ drop in the share price? That seems weird to me.

What if the market expected 25% more then reported ? Nobody "knows" what the market expects. People infer it by looking at forward valuation, company guidance, investor expectations, and many many other things happening in the world, in competition, in the value chain. And of course the market does its thing and figures that this company has x% chance of beating (or missing) by $y, and when it's wrong the moves can be huge.

IME you have to be true to what you predict. Whether you're predictably growing, predictably shrinking, or predictably flat if you blow your prediction that's when people start to worry that you don't know what you're doing.

Especially when the expectations are informed by the company’s own guidance about what to expect and they are wrong. It means they missed their own predictions which doesn’t engender confidence.

Worst day, so far* ;-)

All over the place in Big Blue land:

Jan 28: IBM Mainframe Business Jumps 67%

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46802376

Feb 13: IBM tripling entry-level jobs after finding the limits of AI adoption

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47009327

Feb 23: IBM Plunges After Anthropic's Latest Update Takes on COBOL

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47128907

Apr 30: Granite 4.1: IBM's 8B Model Matching 32B MoE

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47960507

Jun 25: IBM debuts sub-1 nanometer chip technology

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48674967

This shouldn’t surprise anyone who has dealt with IBM over the past 10-20 years.

1 - IBM audits your company’s software usage.

2 - They find a couple servers that someone forgot to turn off a decade ago that nobody uses.

3 - Since it was found in an audit “you’ll lose the 90% discount” and they present the CFO with a $20 million bill.

4 - “It pains us to have to enforce this MSA that your predecessors signed 20 years ago. In the spirit of partnership we can make this go away with a $2 million Watson purchase.”

5 - You get the Watson subscription which you don’t dare turn on.

6 - IBM touts the growth of AI to Wall Street [0] and fires a bunch of old people [1].

Of course this wasn’t going to end well.

[0] https://www.constellationr.com/insights/news/ibm-q4-better-e...

[1] https://www.publicjustice.net/federal-court-boston-ibm-age-d...

Retired Red Hatter here.

When IBM bought Red Hat in the late twenty teens, they offered us a 10% discount on the stock as an ESPP. At the going price, the stock already had a 5% dividend. It seemed like a great deal.

Our internal mailing list ( the late great Memo List ) had a lively discussion. The majority didn’t see the raging bargain ahead of them. Most seemed to like the safe path— buy the stock, then immediately sell it and invest the proceeds in an index fund. It’s not bad advice, but it deconcentrated your bet.

The index has had some fantastic years since. But I think IBM did even better. The stock went from low one hundreds to over 300 for a while. Even after this big drop, you’d still be far, far ahead. You still get the dividend, too.

In this case the only way to lose was to not play.

IBM could've been Palantir x100.

they've the people, tech - only thing stopping them is myopic leadership.

I remember they were pushing the AI narrative all along the 2010s on their front page. 10 years ahead of everybody.

We looked into it at the time there was nothing interesting.

Outside of the mainframe, power business, some research and cool things they bought like Redhat and Hashicorp, IBM is an horrible company. They are the incarnation of the cold, stupid corporation, the buzzword soup and the sales to entrap you in an expensive unending nightmare.

I heard they had a lot of really good people but my guess is most of them left.

They were ahead of the industry in Marketing but not in reality.

Having AI and an army of consultants is the market standard today. This is because it works.

IBM slapped Watson on everything, and claimed a ton of revenue. In reality they had a bunch of customers who hated them for decades of broken promises.

That battle was fought in 2012-2015 and except for a few exceptions, IBM lost. The only real advantage IBM had was in mainframes with 1-10TB RAM. For example, customers who like doing database joins on a time-slice of countrywide telecoms data. Only a few customers have that use case, unsurprisingly.

People will argue that it's not dead yet but they're barely top 100 in the world, when they used to be... Number one.

Ouch.

Now, people are going to argue again but IBM, in its dying breath in 2000, did something really amazing: they committed one billion dollar to finance the development of that little known thing in the world called...

Linux.

Maybe Linux would have been immensely successful even without that one billion dollar investment from IBM but I cannot help but see that move in 2000 as the ultimate revenge move against Microsoft.

IBM knew it was falling into irrelevancy, Microsoft had 95%+ browsers market share and the future looked grim. Apple was in bad shape, smartphones didn't exist yet. It looked like Microsoft would conquer everything else.

Turns out: Microsoft (sadly) mostly kept the desktop but, thankfully, it's Linux that conquered just about everything (and OS X / MacOS / iOS quite a bit too).

So big thanks to IBM for that move.

You can think what you want but to me this what a move to prevent Microsoft from owning the entire software world.

its ironic that IBM sold off its x86 pc/server to Lenovo and kept their big iron (mainframe) but now everyone is buying up pc/server due to AI boom. Dell's stock have been surging with the rest of AI stocks

Lenovo sale was decades ago. IBM could have bought a pc company in 2022 when ChatGPT came out or anytime since.

But strategically they decided against a Hardware play and went for software:

2022- ChatGPT released

2023 - IBM buys Manta Software Inc undisclosed sum

2023 - IBM buys Software AG's StreamSets and webMethods $2.33 billion

2025- IBM buys Hashicorp $6.4 billion

2025 - IBM buys Confluent $11 billion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HashiCorp

I think it made sense on its own terms. They retrenched into the business where they are actually differentiated. It is notable that IBM net margins have been ~15% at best for decades. It's an odd business that is huge and just trucks along without remarkable growth. It is the butt of jokes but also a top 100 company by many measures.

> It's an odd business that is huge and just trucks along without remarkable growth.

This isn’t odd at all. It’s a feature common to most businesses that have been around 100 years or more.

Well, it's odd in that they do this sideways financial performance while also from time to time dropping a state-of-the-art microprocessor, like a real tech giant.

You could also see that it's odd in that most companies from 100 years ago simply don't exist. The perfectly flat trajectory bordering on fade-out is uncommon. The median 100-year-old tech company is Sperry, not IBM.

They just need to wait until nobody is selling or can buy new PCs and are forced to use outdated equipment to use as dumb terminals to access those mainframes.

Pretty sad that the company that invented DRAM completely divested itself of actually making any, now that it’s wildly profitable.

History shows that DRAM is a brutally cyclical business with boom and bust cycles. It's also heavily capital intensive. You build an expensive fab now, and then demand plummets and you're stuck selling at near cost while carrying enormous fixed assets.

IBM is already not the best at making strategic calls. I can't imagine them being saddled with DRAM business with its repeated busts.

There is graveyard of DRAM companies that never made it.

This was great timing for IBM employees with RSU's. Many folks had RSUs which literally unlocked this morning.

Great meaning bad?

Depends what happens next. RSUs are taxed as ordinary income at their market value at the time they vest, so it's not necessarily bad if the stock is down.

In fact, the ideal scenario is that the price drops just before your vest and then bounces back up after.

If an employee periodically vests a fixed number of shares, as opposed to a fixed dollar amount of shares, this is actually untrue.

Assume an employee's marginal tax rate is 40% and their capital gains rate is 15%. Then there are 2 scenarios:

1. Vest 100 shares at $100 apiece. After tax that's 60 shares * $100 = $6000 total.

2. A sudden price drop causes 100 shares to vest at $50. After tax that's 60 shares * $50 = $3000. Later the price rises to $100 and the employee sells them. Another $3000 in capital gains, leaving $2550 after taxes. Total = $5250.

>2. A sudden price drop causes 100 shares to vest at $50. After tax that's 60 shares * $50 = $3000. [...]

This is only true if you "sell" 40 shares immediately at the time of vesting to pay the tax bill. Because you lose the 40 shares, you don't have as much shares to appreciate in the subsequent upswing. However if you prefer to settle your tax obligations in cash instead, you don't have this issue and you'd actually pay less taxes (assuming the upswing does materialize). It's risky though, because you're basically taking a long position on the stock, and if it falls even more, you'd lose even more money.

> This is only true if you "sell" 40 shares immediately at the time of vesting to pay the tax bill

I wasn't aware there's a choice. That's a paycheck withholding essentially.

Paying taxes isn't optional. Sure you can invest more in the stock with external funds but that's not a fair proposition. If you were to tell me there's a certain chance of a stock going up by 100% we could also just buy calls with those magic funds and make far more money.

In the UK you pay income tax on the initial price; then if you hold the shares before selling capital gains tax on any gains. However CGT is a much lower rate than income tax so I guess it could be a bit advantageous. But you have to factor that against the risk of holding a single company's shares (also the company you work for), against selling and buying into the whole market.

can you show the math for your last statement?

And then bounces back.

Go buy it right now, profit tomorrow.

Awful advice usually given by red-faced bag holders, lol. Wait for the real bottom, buy it IF it starts to recover.

“Wait for the real bottom” is doing a lot of work.

Tell you what, come back here in 24 hours and let’s touch base and we will see if you or I was right.

IBM currently $217.76 down 24.97% my prediction it bounces back up within 24 hours.

Just checked again, my red-faced bag holder chum. It actually closed down again. But let me guess, this is now the REAL time to buy the dip right? I see you bag holders trying this every time some PPT-supported stock drops.

You were correct. I concede and stand corrected.

It’s only bounced back 1.2%, nobody wants to buy your bags lol.

Not sure what the title was when submitting, but current title is: IBM is on pace for its worst day ever

Was it the release of the Cardiff Electric Giant that caused this?

> IBM Stock has worst day

(so far)

What does IBM even do? Something with India, and servicing legacy no-bid government pork contracts, as far as I can tell. That appears to be the focus and has been for a long time.

Make ads lying about how good at AI they are.

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