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
Wall Street Breakfast · Earnings reactions and the next wave of AI speculation · 14 Feb 2025
podcast
In the first wave, it was the NVIDIAs of the world and sort of the pickaxe and shovel type companies for this gold rush. And now we're moving into the companies that are actually putting it into effect in these products and the sort of productivity and upgrades that it can give to customer UX and based on AI. And so I think Palantir has become sort of the spotlight company for that.
And I think it's getting a lot of the money that's come out of some of the chip makers and the other first wave AI winners. Some of that money that's being trimmed out of those is moving into Palantir.
Just looking ahead to next week, the earnings calendar is starting to slow down. There's still a fair number of reports coming out, but the biggest names are kind of off the table at this point. If you're looking for kind of a highlight for next week, I think Walmart. is going to get a lot of attention. It's sitting at 52-week highs recently. It's up 83% in the past 12 months.
So in a lot of ways, it's been trading like a growth stock, even though there couldn't be a more stable establishment.
Yeah, right. But yeah, there's been sort of... a rush into Walmart. It was not even a rush, it's sort of a steady drip, drip, drip over the last 12 months. And I think that's partly the same kind of Coke McDonald's value play, the expectation that inflation is going to drive people to lower price alternatives. Walmart's also getting a lot of credit for its e-commerce gains.
It's making a lot of inroads there and international expansion. One thing to look out for when the earnings come out is whether or not the company is worried about tariffs. Again, it's a large international company. It's low price. kind of strategy is based around getting cheap goods from overseas.
And so if the management there is starting to sweat it a little bit about potential tariffs, I think that would be a sign that other companies might be following in those footsteps.
Yeah, I would expect it to emerge in the earnings conference call after it. I don't expect in the press release they'll say anything about it, unless they actually temper financial expectations. Sales growth won't be as strong as we thought because tariffs. But I don't expect that to happen. I think it'll be more, like you're saying, coded.
And I think it'll come out in the Q&A in the earnings report, earnings conference call.
Honestly, I would be surprised if an analyst doesn't ask about tariffs in the conference call, then I don't know that they're doing their job effectively. I think if you're a Walmart investor, I can't imagine anything else being on your mind at this point.
On Thursday next week. Don't forget, these episodes will be up with transcriptions at SeekingAlpha.com slash WSB. And for a full suite of news, analysis, ratings, and data on stocks and ETFs, go to SeekingAlpha.com slash subscriptions.
Thanks. Big shoes to fill, but I'm ready.
So the obvious big news in terms of Fed prediction that happened this week was the CPI report, which came in very hot. Pretty much took a rate cut off the table for the March meeting and pushed it back quite a ways. There's now an 86% chance of no change in May. So we're looking in the kind of June, July, September timeframe for a cut.
Another thing to look at is the chance of no cut at all this year. has gone up dramatically. It's now sitting at about 23%. This is based on market trading. It was 11% a week ago, so more than doubled in the course of the week. And the major catalyst for that is a CPI report. So the market's getting used to the idea of higher for longer.
that we might have these interest rates even through the rest of 2025. Though by and large, stocks took it in stride. There was a sizable dip as the news came out at the opening of trading and then the recovery. And as we said on Thursday, we're now higher than we were before the news came out. So by and large, it's been kind of shrugged off.
But I think if you're an investor, you're kind of looking longer term. impact on consumer impact, on businesses' ability to borrow, things like that. It is definitely something to keep an eye on.
The impact on individual sectors, I would look to the traditionally interest rate sensitive sectors. So REITs is a good example of a sector that moves in accordance to how interest rates are looking. The home builders and other housing stocks are another indication. If it's becomes more difficult for those companies to book revenue and therefore can affect their bottom line.
So I would keep an eye on those things. I would keep an eye on the treasury market as well. There's kind of the feeling that the treasury traders are the smartest traders on the financial markets. And so you can kind of get a pretty good idea of what the street thinks generally of the prospects for inflation and other aspects based on the movement. in treasuries.
And then secondarily, I think it's interesting, another news point this week was Powell appearing in a semiannual testimony on Capitol Hill. Those conversations didn't have a lot to do with inflation. I mean, they had sort of the normal amount, but there was also a lot of conversation just about sort of the intersection of the Fed and the new administration.
The Trump administration has been much more kind of aggressive in stating its opinions about interest rates, specifically that they should be lower. And I think that it'll be an interesting kind of dance to watch the machinations between a supposedly independent Fed and the White House.
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