November 14, 2024
What You Need to Know Today:
Good news: What we now know about this coming earnings season
It’s still very early in third quarter earnings season, but I think we can already see a pattern.
Buying more Nvidia on the best dip I think we’ll get
I was hoping that Nvidia (NVDA) would take a bigger dip on its “disappointing” earnings news last week. But a 7% or so drop looks like the best we’ll get. And I certainly want to own these shares before the revenue from the new Blackwell chips kicks in during 2025. I already own these shares in my long-term 50 Stocks Portfolio. Today I’m adding them to my 12-18 month Jubak Picks Portfolio. The bad news out of Nvidia last week in its August 28 earnings report?
Looking backward: In Q2 the economy did better than we thought
The U.S. economy grew at a stronger pace in the second quarter than initially reported. Gross domestic product, GDP, rose at a 3% annualized rate during the April-June quarter, up from the previous estimate of 2.8%, the Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Thursday, August 29.
The big thing to watch for in today’s Nvidia after-the-close earnings report: Blackwell delays
A report Saturday said one of Nvidia’s next generation chips will be delayed by a just-discovered design flaw. Tech news site The Information, citing a couple of industry sources, said volume shipments of the Blackwell B200 chip would be delayed some three months.
This market has an AI problem–AI companies aren’t making money
Remember the good old days–say, 2023–when all you had to do was slap AI in the name of a company and the stock would soar? I kept waiting for AI Burgers made from AI cows, or AI Shoes, which used AI machine learning algorithms to tell you what size shoe you needed. This investor embrace of all things AI led to the fear that there was an AI-stock market bubble that would send the entire stock market into a very painful bear market when it broke. The appetite for AI stocks is still huge–witness the rebound in Nvidia (NVDA) shares that added $400 billion to the stock’s market cap in a four-day recovery from the “sky-is-falling, we’re-headed-to-a-recession stock market retreat. But this stock market still has a big AI problem. We will find out how big when Nvidia reports earnings after the close tomorrow, August 28. Here’s the problem: Most AI companies aren’t making money.
Consumers more confident–but more worried about jobs
U.S. consumer confidence rose to a six-month high in August. The Conference Board’s gauge of sentiment increased to 103.3 from an upwardly revised 101.9 a month earlier, data out Tuesday showed. The median estimate in a Bloomberg survey of economists called for a reading of 100.7. But…
Special Report A New World for Dividend Investors Pick #4 Equinor
Equinor (EQNR) is Pick #4 in my Special Report A New World for Dividend Investors. I posted this pick in my long Special Report post. But I wanted to flag it here as well so no one wouldl miss the pick. Dividend Pick #4: Equinor (EQNR)
Live Market Report (20 minute delay)
Here’s the 3-year road map for AI hardware–and a buy on AMD
It’s important to remember exactly how young artificial intelligence is as a market product. I certainly don’t think it’s possible to project the long-term winners on either the software or hardware side. Remember the days when Apple (AAPL) thought it was worth buying a Super Bowl add to urge consumers to smash the IBM PC empire? But I do think the hardware road map is petty clear for the next two to three years. Which is why I’m adding shares of Advanced Micro Devices to my portfolios tomorrow.
Not so fast–the rethink of when the Fed will start to cut rates continues to hit stock and bond prices
Last month, the bond market was almost fully pricing the first interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve in March. Now, though the odds for a 25 basis point cut are down to more like 50/50. Today, January 17, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose another 5 basis points to 4.10%.
China economic growth hit official target in 2022, but population plunge accelerates
Well, what did you expect Chinese officials to talk about at Davos? Yesterday, Premier Li Qiang said in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that China’s economy is expected to have grown 5.2% in 2023. Which would exceed the government’s target of “around 5%” set in March. Li’s estimate roughly agrees with the average 5.3% expected by economists. In 2022, China’s economy grew at a 3% rate.But also yesterday, the National Bureau of Statistics said that China’s population decline has accelerated.
Good news/bad news from China on stimulus
Chinese officials have indicated that the government is considering issuing 1 trillion yuan ($139 billion) of new debt under a special sovereign bond plan. The plan would sell ultra-long sovereign bonds to fund projects related to food, energy, supply chains, and urbanization. The sale of this type of ultra-long bonds is rare: In the aftermath of the Asian Financial Crisis in 1998, for example, the government issued special debt to replenish capital for major state-owned banks. The most recent sale was in 2020, when authorities issued 1 trillion yuan worth of those bonds to pay for pandemic response measures. The new round of stimulus is good news for a global economy that has been struggling with lagging growth as China’s economy has slowed. But the plan is bad news for anyone worried about the deep structural problems facing China’s economy.
Nothing exceeds like excess–too much of a good thing for bond prices
Mae West said, “Too much of a good thing is never enough.” For the financial markets that’s just not true, however. The markets are prone to swing to excess and then to painfully retrace the extreme end of the swing. You can see it happening now with interest rates and the bond market.
Hertz pulls the plug on electric cars–especially Tesla
Hertz (HTZ) plans to sell a third of its U.S. electric vehicle fleet and reinvest in gas-powered cars. The company says the shift is due to weak demand and high repair costs for its electric vehicle fleet. Which is dominated by Telsa’s electric vehicles. Electric vehicles make up about 11% of the Hertz fleet and 80% of those electric vehicles are Tesla. The news certainly isn’t a plus for electric cars and electric car makers. But I think it’s also important not to forget that Hertz is struggling to show improvements to its bottom line. Tesla’s price cuts–and their effect the resale value of the Hertz fleet–may have more to do with this abrupt about face than weak demand and higher repair costs.
Special Report: 10 Great Growth Stocks that Are Getting Greater–today my 10th (and final) pick QCOM
GREATER Growth Stock Pick #10: Qualcomm (QCOM). I think the market and the current stock price are missing a good prt of the growth story for Qualcomm. Which is why I find the stock undervalued enough to buy here. Right now the market disagrees. However, I’ll be adding the stock to my Jubak Picks and Volatility Portfolios on Tuesday, January 16.
Saturday Night Quarterback says, For the week ahead expect…
Like every season of earnings reports, this one will be chock full of real earnings news and will come complete with strenuous efforts at gaming those real results. Three big questions for the week-and for earnings season. First, question: How much “bad news” has been already discounted by analyst cuts to earnings expectations?
Fed uses CPI inflation “miss” to push back on timing of interest rate cuts
Federal Reserve officials were out with one message today: The slightly higher-than-expected CPI inflation number for December/the slightly-slower-than-expected slowdown in CPI inflation argues that there’s still more work to be done on bringing inflation down to the Fed’s 2% target. And that talk of a rate cut in March is premature.
Ooops! CPI inflation doesn’t dip in December as expected
CPI inflation isn’t falling as quickly as economists had predicted and as investors and traders had hoped. At the least, the numbers call into question the belief that the Federal Reserve will begin to cut interest rates as early as its March 20 meeting.
Is the debt market ignoring the coming wave of bond supply?
Right now all that the bond market and indeed all the financial markets care about is when will the Federal Reserve begin to cut interest rates. The consensus is that sometime relatively soon–March or more likely June–the Fed will begin to deliver interest rate cuts that will total somewhere around 100 basis points (at least) for 2024. But what if the Federal Reserve and other central banks around the world really aren’t in control of interest rates in the bond market anymore?
Good news for chip stocks–well, for some chip stocks
In November global chip sales rose for the first time in more than a year. Global semiconductor revenue added up to $48 billion in November, a 5.3% increase from a year earlier, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. Sales rose a more moderate 2.9% from October. But the good news didn’t extend to all chip segments.
Earnings season starts–Part 1 banks to disappoint
Earnings season for the fourth quarter of 2023 begins on Friday, January 12 with reports from the big banks JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Wells Fargo (WFC), Citigroup (C), and Bank of America (BAC). Which means that earnings season is going start off with a dull thud. More than 70% of the Standard & Poor’s 500 companies that are scheduled to report earnings for the fourth quarter over the next few weeks are banks and the banking segment of the the financial sector in the index is projected by Wall Street analysts to show a 21% year over year decline in earnings
Saturday Night Quarterback says, For the week ahead watch…
The big short run question–at least ahead of the Federal Reserve’s March 20 meeting on interest rates–is whether the financial markets have gotten too far ahead of the Fed on the pace of interest rate cuts. Here’s what to watch.
Job market looked solid in December–or did it?
The U.S. economy added 216,000 jobs in December, up from 173,000 the previous month. That was a bg surprise to Wall Street. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected had added 175,000 jobs . The unemployment rate held steady at 3.7% for the month from November, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Economists had expected the unemployment rate to tick higher to 3.8%. The the BLS revised previous reports of job gain donward for December and November. Looking solely at these headline numbers, you’d conclude that the labor market is running hotter than expected/hoped by investors and that this report lowered the odds that the Federal Reserve would begin cutting interest rates as early at its March 20 meeting. And that fears that the Fed would delay interest rate cuts would hurt stocks. That isn’t exactly what happened today
ASML shares hit (again) by export restrictions worries
You may have noticed that shares of chip equipment maker ASML Holding have been in retreat lately. The shares are down from a $757 close on December 29 to $700 today, January 4. That’s at 7.5% drop. So what’s up?
Progress of a sort: Wind sector troubles continue to unwind
I think this is good news, sort of, for the very troubled wind power sector.
Yesterday, January 3, Equinor (EQNR) and BP (BP) announced that they would terminate their contract and exit the 1.2 gigawatt Empire Wind 2 project off the coast of New York. Why is this good news?
Big tech NASDAQ 100 records four-day losing streak
Wall Street strategists began the year calling for a pull back in U.S. stocks after the huge year-end rally of 2023. So far that call is right on. NASDAQ 100 stocks fell 1.1% today Wednesday, January 3, to extend their losing streak to four sys, the longest in more than two moths. The Standard & Poor’s 50 ended the y down 0.80% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 076%. The NASDAQ Composite lost 1.18% on the day. The Russell 2000 small-cap index dropped 3.3%. The CBOE S&P 500 Volatility Index (VXI) gained 644% to a still very low “fear” rating of 14.05. But what’s the cause and what’s the effect?
BYD climbs over Tesla to become No. 1 in electric car deliveries in the fourth quarter
This change at the top of the electric car market was widely expected. The only debate was whether it take place in the last quarter of 2023 or early in 2024. Now, we know. With both Tesla (TSLA) and BYD (BYDDF) reporting fourth quarter delivery numbers in the last few days, the switch at No. 1 is now complete.
Special Report: 10 Great Growth Stocks that Are Getting Greater–today my 9th pick PANW
GREATER Growth Stock Pick #9: Palo Alto Networks (PANW). I’m not going to try to convince you that shares of cyber-security favorite Palo Alto Networks are a value stock. It trades at 166 times trialing 12-month earnings per share. And I’m not going to try to convince you that this is an undiscovered stock that’s going to sneak up on anyone. The shares was up 111% in 2023. (The stock has been a member of my long-term 50 Stocks Portfolio since July 17, 2019. In that time the position is up 296%.) But remember the point of this Special Report–I’m looking for great growth stocks, which aren’t cheap in this market by any means, with catalysts in the next year or two that will push growth higher. And here I think Palo Alto Systems rings the bell three times over.
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