Brian Stewart
speaker
910 appearances
18 recordings
2 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard 10 Apr
Brian Stewart’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Feb 2026 with 4.
Appearances
Overall, EV sales were up in Europe in the same data set. So the fact that Tesla was down so sharply might be something very Tesla related. The fall has brought Tesla below $1 trillion in market cap for the first time in November. So you can kind of see the upside and downside of his close association with the Trump administration.
You saw Tesla rally sharply after the election, but now that there's much more controversy around his activities in relation to the government, you're starting to see that having an effect on Tesla.
Yeah, United Health was down 9% this week. As you said, the proposed Medicaid cuts are starting to raise red flags. That's a big part of their business. There's also a DOJ probe of its Medicare billing practices. So the stock in general is down 14% since early February. So this is starting to seep into the market, the idea that there's less government support in general.
Another example is Palantir. There's concerns about the budget cuts have sort of taken some of the air out of that stock. It was up 24% after its earnings report in early February, but has recently had a five session losing streak. And that was a pretty dramatic drop. Each of those five sessions, it was down 3% and then two of them or a 10% or more drop.
So you're starting to see, even if it's individual companies or sectors, starting to see kind of the ripple effect of budget cuts that are being put into place, or at least the proposed budget cuts. And then in general, you can kind of, if we take it back to a more macro level and look at the economic data, people are starting to get worried about the economy in general.
We saw initial jobless claims jump to a multi-month high in the most recent data. And so you're starting to see worries about layoffs. This is critical ahead of next week's jobs data, which is a little backward looking. But still, I think people are going to be looking at that really closely to see if the cut in public jobs is starting to have a broader economic impact.
I think they're starting to lower a little bit. The job market has been one of the bright spots. As we've been fighting inflation, the fact that the job market has held up as well as it has, has sort of given the Fed permission to kind of take the inflation fight more seriously than it could otherwise if it also had to worry about the economy.
But if you have an economy that's starting to show some cracks, it puts the Fed in a real bind because if it cuts rates to protect the economy, then that could unleash the inflation goblin. But if you fight inflation, you might undermine any attempt to jumpstart the economy. So you end up in a situation where the Fed is sort of stuck between a rock and a hard place.
Troublesome data point that affected the markets this week is the Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index dropped to 98.3 in February. This was down from a little over 105 in January. That's the biggest monthly fall since August of 2021. Anytime you're saying biggest whatever since the COVID shutdowns, you're probably in sort of frightening territory. So one of the...
Sub-indexes in there is the expectation index dropped 9.3 points to 72.9. That's below the 80 mark. That's usually seen as a recession red flag. So you see consumers in general are just starting to look around and see high inflation, see an economy that doesn't seem to be... be as solid as it once was, and they're starting to get worried.
Next week, there's a lot of retailers on the earnings docket. So in terms of getting a vibe about what consumers are thinking, I think those earnings reports are going to be important. One of the key ones is Costco. They're coming out Thursday. The company is recently off a 52-week high. It's gotten a lot of run in the fact that it's a low-price company. competitor.
And so it brings in a lot of people who are worried about inflation and looking to find deals. Those are your Costco customers. But with the increases come valuation concerns. So there's worries of whether Costco can keep up the momentum that it's had. And then elsewhere, you have a lot of department stores like Macy's and Nordstrom's and then other clothing retailers like like Gap are reporting.
So like I said, to get an idea of the spending habits of the general consumer, I think taking those reports sort of in aggregate would be a good data source.
Well, the biggest preliminary to the waiver reports that's coming that we had was the Walmart earnings, which sent the stock down a little bit. There was just sort of worries that it couldn't keep up the momentum it had. Walmart's in sort of a special case because it has the benefit of size plus... the low price kind of business plan kind of works well in an inflationary environment.
So companies that have sort of a higher price level like Nordstrom's, it'll be interesting to see whether or not they can kind of still draw people in or whether people are sort of looking around for cheaper deals.
And another data point to be drawn from that, and this will be more from the conference calls and other commentary from management, is just whether or not there's concern about tariffs and whether or not that's going to interrupt
I haven't seen any. The earnings reports that are coming out are obviously a little backward looking. You're looking at least like six weeks backwards as the company sort of put together their earnings reports when the quarters end. But there are some commentaries coming out. For instance, Budweiser just released its earnings. It's up about 11% in the past week.
It jumped 7% on its earnings report. It said that it sees only limited impact from tariffs. So that's a global company saying that it probably won't see a big hit from tariffs. In the sales in general, revenue was up 3%, but volumes were down 2%.
So you have a situation where a company is making up for lower volumes with higher prices and then getting help from cost management from keeping costs low. In that particular case, it's basically a company that's managing its business well and in a difficult environment. So you're bound to find other companies that aren't managing as well in a difficult environment.
And so it becomes just a much, much more sensitive process trying to tiptoe through the landmine. Well, one thing to note about tariffs in general is the companies don't pay them per se. Some might make the decision just to eat as much of the tariffs as they can, but other ones are going to just pass it on
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