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
on investors part and on corporate executives part about how much the consumer is going to hold it up.
No, just that next week is also going to see the PCE indicator release. That's the Fed's favorite inflation gauge. Inflation data from last week was much stronger than expected, kind of sparked a mini panic about the Fed really pushed back expectations. That's come back a little in the past week. People have sort of moderated their expectations.
Still, the next meeting for the Fed is still expected to be no interest rate cut. And then the meeting after that in May, also expected to be no cut. But now in the sort of June, July framework, people are starting to think that the next cut might happen.
So that PCE indicator, it's either going to confirm the sort of hot inflation that we saw a week ago, or if it gives a different indication, it might move that expectation a little bit. So if you're looking at interest rates, that's the next big piece of data coming out.
Wall Street Breakfast · Earnings reactions and the next wave of AI speculation · 14 Feb 2025
podcast
Great to be here, Rina.
There's kind of a background radiation going on in terms of the CPI report that recently came out and the effect on the Fed. Also shenanigans out of Washington, a lot of Doge related headlines coming out recently. I think that's going to be kind of a standard background noise for trading in the foreseeable future.
It seems that we're going to have to kind of rifle through the kind of bickering in Washington. However, I think the stock market itself has seemed pretty immune to any of that. There hasn't been pickup and aggressive volatility over the last several weeks. I think by and large, it's been following momentum of its own. A lot of that is sort of still the AI trade. in effect.
And I think there's still a lot of individual stock picking. I think with the earnings season peaking in the last couple of weeks, I think investors have largely been looking at the individual company's financial results and not been too worried about the macro scene.
One interesting theme over the last week is there's quite a few old school consumer companies that did well following the earnings. One example is Philip Morris, which jumped 14%. the past week. That was kind of an individual company story. The company is seeing a very successful transition to smoke-free products.
And so it was moving out of the traditional tobacco cigarettes and moving into things like nicotine packages and vapes. And so that process was seen as being sort of aggressively underway in the earnings since that drove But you also have companies like Coca-Cola, which beat expectations, showed strong organic sales growth.
There's worry still about higher costs and the prospects of tariffs affecting a large international company like Coke. But by and large, the results kind of going into the current quarter that just finished have shown that it's prospering pretty well. And the same with a company like McDonald's, which is up 6%. in the past week.
Interestingly, it missed expectations, but there was investors tended to focus more on the strength and global sales that it showed as well as the investments and value deals. So companies like Coke and McDonald's, I think are seen as value plays in an inflationary environment. So you have these strong brands that offer low cost products.
There's a view that those kinds of companies will prosper in that environment. McDonald's missed expectations, but still went higher. Uber dropped in the immediate aftermath of its earnings, but is up 23% in the past week as a whole. So there was a dip and then a buy on the dip. I think the main catalyst there is Bill Ackman announced a stake in the company.
And I think a lot of people saw that as a starter pistol for a higher move up. So I think there's a lot of traders that Jumped into that just sort of on his coattails to ride that trade higher. Also, Lyft dropped after its earnings a light booking forecast. So I think Uber saw the benefit of that. I think there was the idea that Uber might be winning that rivalry.
And in general, and this has been a theme of a lot of companies. I mean, Tesla is a great example of a company that was seen significant benefit on the prospects of future technology, especially autonomous vehicles.
And Uber is right there getting a tailwind from predictions that eventually it'll be able to kind of stick the AV landing and be able to finally have that fuel the top and bottom lines going forward.
Yeah, just to discuss Tesla briefly, I think that has a lot to do with the perceived distraction of Elon Musk being at the centerpiece of the Doge debates and also making a bid and then withdrawing a bid for open AI. I think people did not see that as sort of a serious attempt to take over that company and more of a publicity campaign.
And so I think there's a sense to which he's kind of taking his eye off the ball in terms of Tesla specifically. And I also think that Tesla stock ran up significantly in the post-election timeframe. And there's a process of profit taking that's going on for that. And so it's down 11% in the past week and is at a three-month low.
But like I said, I think that's largely Musk personality related and not really a statement about people's opinions about AI or even Tesla's underpinning prospects. If we look at Palantir, I think that's an interesting one because it rallied immediately after its earnings report had a blockbuster. financial figures and has continued to stair step higher since.
It's been alternating up days and down days since its earnings, but the up days are all bigger than the down days. So it's sort of a aggressive buy on dip going on there. Palantir has become the symbol of, I think, the next wave of AI speculation. Web Bush said about its earnings, the AI software era is now arriving. I'm paraphrasing there.
Showing 861–880 of 910 · page 44 of 46
← Previous
Next →