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
It's kind of sluggish growth. And honestly, the stock has been in the doldrums for a long time now. It came down during the pandemic as people pushed off. It's a medical device company. And so as people pushed off some surgeries because the medical community was obviously focused on COVID that cut into its revenue and it hasn't been able to recover yet.
It's basically the same levels now as it was in October of 2022. So the stock has had a hard time coming back after that post-COVID drop. So it's worth kind of looking at. You and I had talked about past couple of weeks with the pharmaceutical companies coming out that there has been a longstanding post-COVID hangover in the healthcare sector, generally speaking.
So I think that's something to watch going forward is when do these companies get into the next cycle of growth? Another company that was on the downside Unilever, which is a consumer goods company, was down after its earnings. And the larger thing to note there is just that one of the worries was commodity inflation.
So it's just a sign that inflation remains problematic for some of these consumer facing companies.
Yeah, just using Medtronic as the jumping off point, some of the commentary after those earnings came out was just there was no visibility of when the next catalyst for that stock was, where the next wave of large growth. So the company might be executing well in terms of moving the products that it has, but it's just not clear where that sort of next jump forward was going to come from.
And I think that's probably true of a lot of these companies. the pharmaceutical companies that got a big boost from COVID, that was a lot of investment that they put into those drugs. So they basically put their pipeline on hold to move over to COVID during that time.
And so I think some of them have had a hard time getting back to diversifying their R&D in such a way that they can get the next big one. And I do think that the weight loss drug boost has kind of built in to the stocks. There's a lot of competition in that area now. And so data comes out and new products hit on that front. I think they're all kind of running into a crowded market.
So I do think there's sort of a look of what the next big, you don't want to call it a fad or a trend, but for lack of a better word, the next big healthcare trend is going to be.
So where's the next growth? And everybody...
know whatever the your sort of political feelings on it everybody got the vaccine for covet everybody was um you know taking tests for covet and so there was sort of full saturation for those kind of things so what's the product that's going to tap into the broadest possible public adoption because obviously if you go through healthcare companies you're going to find a few winners you know companies that that had
an excellent test for a cancer drug or something like that. I mean, it's pretty easy to find big winners in the healthcare space. But when you're talking about the healthcare space in general, you kind of need those overarching themes that are going to drive the entire sector.
Yeah, Berkshire is always going to make headlines because people are going to look for Buffett's macro assessments. So it's not going to be the results of the company specifically, but more about what Warren Buffett sees generally for the market. So watch for headlines there. I think in terms of the healthcare conversation, I think HIMSS is a good...
company to look at just in terms of being sort of the low price direct to customer kind of company having kind of a different business model than a Merck or Pfizer. So seeing how its results are going, especially as we talk about weight loss drugs, and that's obviously a huge part of their business. So I think that that's definitely interesting.
Other than those names, NVIDIA obviously is the big one coming out. I think if you're talking about the AI trade, that'll be a good litmus test of how that's going. Especially look for commentary from them about DeepSeek specifically and growing competition in the AI space generally. Also, they might have something to say about trade concerns, both tariffs and restrictions of selling products.
certain chips to certain countries. So there might be questions asked in the earnings conference call about that. So that would be interesting to look at. And then just in a totally different sector, Home Depot and Lowe's are both reporting next week. The Home Depot especially saw a lot of strength in the second half of last year, but has been choppy lately. And
A lot of that is concerns about the housing market with interest rates going up and the price of loans going up. But this could go either way for Home Depot if housing stock is getting older because home building is slowing down and its home equity loans become more expensive. So people can't pay to hire a contractor to come do their addition.
You might see more do-it-yourself kind of upgrades in houses, which... would benefit Home Depot. So I would look at their commentary, both about the housing market in general and just how consumers are responding.
So Walmart was down after its earnings, down about 6%. The outlook was cautious. So I think the worry there was that the consumer in general is starting to slow spending. You and I talked last week about how Walmart might benefit from people... replacing some of their purchases with lower cost things.
As they move down the cost spectrum, that Walmart might be the beneficiary, kind of where people land as they start squeezing their budget. However, if they're having trouble grabbing customers, even in the sort of high inflationary environment, that might be a sign that people have stopped spending in general. So I think there's an eye on the consumer.
The recent economic news has been relatively strong, jobs report and so forth. Next week, the GDP report is coming out. That's backward looking. It's a revised data for the previous quarter. So that's not going to be any new information. But I do think that Walmart can act as kind of an economic indicator in itself. And it shows a little bit of worry.
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