Brace yourself. This week, the world’s largest tech companies all report their September-quarter financial results. And I mean all of them—Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Apple, Amazon.com, and Intel, with special guest appearances from SAP, Shopify, Spotify, Seagate, ServiceNow, and Corning. Every one of these companies reports results in a three-day span, from Tuesday to Thursday. At least 25% of the S&P 500’s market value will be reporting during the stretch.

It will be the last full read on the sector’s fundamental performance before the end of the year, and the wave of reports could determine the next swing in stock prices. The tech sector continues to face fierce headwinds from the strong dollar, softening consumer spending, rising interest rates, stubbornly high inflation, and a potential recession. The market is yearning for some hint that the worst is over, but don’t hold your breath.

Paul Meeks, portfolio manager with Independent Solutions Wealth Management, has a long list of tech stocks he’d like to buy, but he’s not yet ready. He’s sitting on a pile of cash, waiting for lower lows. Meeks thinks earnings season could be grisly and is particularly worried about chip stocks, which he’s historically loved but is now shunning. Meeks sees downward revisions ahead and worries that conditions in the March and June quarters could be even worse than the last two quarters of 2022.

This past week, though, there were some glimmers of hope. Netflix shares (ticker: NFLX) spiked 13% on Wednesday after the streaming-video pioneer posted better-than-expected subscriber growth and sounded generally bullish about the coming launch of its ad-supported membership tier. One day later,IBMshares (IBM) gained 4.7% after posting revenue that was $500 million above Wall Street estimates, thanks to strong demand in all three of its primary business segments—mainframes, software, and consulting.

Neither report seemed to improve the market’s dour mood, though. And that was before Snap’s(SNAP) disappointing report late Thursday.

Here are five key questions investors will be asking in the days ahead:

Will the recession slow cloud computing? Amazon.com (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), and Alphabet (GOOGL) own the three largest players in the public cloud—Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud. In the June quarter, all three showed strong growth but modest deceleration from the March quarter. The public clouds use consumption-based business models, like utilities—the more computing resources you use, the more you pay. As the economy softens, it’s not unreasonable to expect that customers with weakening business won’t need quite as much computing power as they have in the past. Consensus Wall Street estimates forecast that growth for all three cloud giants will slow further this quarter: Misses from any—or worse, all three—would not be well received.