What Intel's Chart Tells Us Ahead of This Week's Earnings

Intel INTC will report Q3 earnings this week at a time when the chip designer and aspiring foundry firm's shares have doubled in less than three months. What does INTC's chart and fundamental analysis show?

Let's take a look:

Intel's Fundamental Analysis

Intel plans to release its latest results on Thursday after the bell, but INTC under new CEO Lip-Bu Tan has become as well known for deal-making as it has for anything it does operationally.

The list of deals that INTC struck since just April is long.

First, Intel and Taiwan Semiconductor TSM -- INTC's main rival in the silicon-wafer-foundry business -- agreed to form a U.S.-based joint venture to boost Intel's foundry operation. Plans called for TSM to own 20% of that business.

Then in August, the Trump administration converted what had been grant money from the federal government's CHIPS and Science Act and Secure Enclave program into the purchase of Intel equity. That gave the U.S. government a roughly 10% stake in the company that was valued at $8.9 billion at the time.

Shortly thereafter, Softbank SFTBY bought $2 billion of Intel stock, providing the firm with some much welcome capital.

And lastly, Nvidia NVDA formed a strategic partnership with INTC in September and made a $5 billion investment in the company.

The idea is for the two potential rivals to collaborate in the co-development of products for data centers and personal computers. Intel will manufacture custom CPUs for Nvidia as part of the deal, as well combining Intel CPUs and Nvidia GPUs for use in artificial-intelligence-capable PCs.

All of those deals have helped push INTC stock up more than 100% in recent months, from an $18.97 intraday low on Aug. 1 to $38.10 as of Monday's close.

As for Intel's upcoming earnings, Wall Street expects the company to report zero adjusted earnings per share on roughly $13.1 billion of revenue.

While that would amount to a 1.3% year-over-year revenue contraction, the adjusted bottom line would compare well to Intel's $0.46 loss per share in Q3 2024.

Still, only two of the 31 sell-side analysts that I can find that cover Intel have revised their earnings estimates higher since the quarter began. By contrast, 25 have revised those numbers lower, while four have left their estimates unchanged.

Intel's Technical Analysis

Next, let's look at INTC's two-year chart as of Friday afternoon:

Readers will see that Intel shares appear to be trading these days according to Fibonacci sequence retracement levels (the blue- and gray-shaded fields).

Laid under the shaded field, readers will also see a falling-wedge pattern of bullish reversal, marked with a blue box and jagged blue line.

From a technical perspective, this pattern set up Intel's July-to-September rally.

However, that rally ran out of gas very close to the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement level created by INTC's sell-off between December 2023 and April 2025. Still, the stock found support coming off of its September 2025 top at the 23.6% Fibonacci retracement level (one of the lines in the gray field at the chart's right).

Intel has since started to create a potential base of consolidation (i.e., a trading range) at close to its recent highs. The Fibonacci retracement levels are the pivots in both directions for this stock.

Meanwhile, Intel's secondary technical indicators look mixed.

On one hand, the stock's Relative Strength Index (the gray line at the chart's top) is coming out of a technically overbought condition and remains quite robust.

That said, Intel's daily Moving Average Convergence Divergence indicator (or "MACD," marked with black and gold lines and blue bars at the chart's bottom) is more equivocal.

The histogram of the stock's 9-day Exponential Moving Average (or "EMA," denoted by the blue bars) has moved below the zero-bound, which is usually a short-term bearish signal.

The 12-day-EMA (the black line) has crossed below the 26-day EMA (gold line), which is also normally a bearish sign. But both of those lines are still running above zero, which is bullish.

An Options Option

Add it all up and Intel's chart seems fairly neutral.

Some option traders who are looking to get long the stock but don't want to tie up too much capital might choose to employ a combination of a long call and a short put. Here's an example including option strikes related to pivot points indicated by Fibonacci levels:

-- Long one Oct 24 call with a $40 strike price (Intel's recent high) for about $1.30.

-- Short one Oct 24 put with a $34 strike (the above chart's indicated Fibonacci support level) for roughly $0.90.

Net Debit: $0.40.

Should Intel remain between $34 and $40 through the above options' expiration date, the trader will be out the $0.40 paid.

Alternatively, should the stock trade higher than $40 at expiration, the trader will be long 100 shares at a $40.40 net basis.

And should the shares trade below $34 at expiration, the trader will be long 100 shares at a $34.40 net basis.

(Moomoo Technologies Inc. Markets Commentator Stephen "Sarge" Guilfoyle was long INTC at the time of writing this column.)

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