Half off sounds like a deal. On Wall Street, it can be the start of a much bigger sale.
Right now, Intel (INTC), Arm (ARM), Sandisk (SNDK), and CoreWeave (CRWV) are among the AI darlings trading at less than half their 2026 highs, and chip stocks just lost nearly 30% in five weeks.
Stocks are rallying early Monday, and most chip stocks are extending Friday’s bounce. Nvidia (NVDA) is a notable exception, initially falling 8% but clawing back losses, while Intel rallies over 3%.
Veteran trader Michael Martin isn’t biting. “Lower prices mean lower market cap. It doesn’t mean better value,” said Martin, founder of TraderMindset.com, who works with Wall Street legend Victor “Trader Vic” Sperandeo.
“I keep hearing Gordon Gekko’s voice in the back of my mind — ‘A fool and their money are lucky to get together in the first place,’ ” he told Yahoo Finance.
His bigger worry is traders who talk themselves into holding on. “Don’t confuse investor language with trader language,” he said. “If you’re a trader, be a trader.”
Intel’s long, strange trip
Martin’s favorite example is Intel. “A lot of people think like, wow, Intel was 125. I can get it now for half that. It’s a bargain,” he said. “But at 55 or whatever it is, you can see 40 long before you’re gonna see 140.”
Intel’s own history backs him up. The stock peaked at about $75 in August 2000, was down to half by October, and kept going, bottoming near $13 in 2002.
It didn’t close above that dot-com peak again until April 24, 2026. Loyal holders got a victory lap to about $141 in June before the AI selloff dragged the stock back below its old high on Oct. 30. Intel closed Friday at $56, still up about 50% this year.
Intel had plenty of company. Five other dot-com leaders also kept falling after first being cut in half, from another 30% for Microsoft (MSFT) to another 88% for Amazon (AMZN), according to Yahoo Finance calculations.
None of that makes investor language wrong. Amazon now trades at nearly 50 times its 2000 peak.
But that’s an investor’s clock. Trouble starts when a trade gets judged on one.
How to keep a trade from becoming an accident
Martin, a discretionary trader for four decades, offers guidelines, not rules.
Size it small. If you’re just scalping or trading a bounce, think $100 for every $100,000 in an account, or one-tenth of 1%.
Don’t take losses home. “If you buy something on Tuesday … if it’s showing a loss by Friday, it has to trade.”
Know your clock. Younger investors “can buy quality names and hold them forever.” Near retirement, “your first order of business here is to play superior defense.”
