Kristen Schwab

Earnings calls are always about returns.

But Rani Sadka, a finance professor at Boston College, says investors are increasingly taking a more scrutinized look at the Magnificent Seven because of the hundreds of billions of dollars the companies are spending on AI.

Companies need to move beyond hype and prove their worth.

That's maybe easier for firms that make chips or sell cloud infrastructure.

But Shai Balor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, says for companies like Meta and Apple... They kind of have to justify all their AI investment by making its own product more engaging.

Can they grow beyond social media and iPhones and build valuable AI features into their products?

Investors might have to wait a bit longer for answers.

Because despite all the talk about an AI bubble, Dan Ives, head of tech research at Wedbush, says the industry is in its early stages.

The Magnificent 7 and NVIDIA, which reports its fourth quarter earnings next month, are bellwethers for the AI boom.

Ives says investments in AI will keep growing as industries like finance and healthcare create their own products and adopt more of the technology.

I'm Kristen Schwab for Marketplace.

China's trade boom matters to U.S.

businesses and consumers, says Jennifer Li, senior economist at Bank of Montreal.

I think everyone should be always concerned about China.

Li says China is so dominant in producing everything from consumer goods to rare earth minerals that its costs of labor and production set the bar against which other countries, including the U.S., have to compete.

But now, with tariffs boosting the cost of Chinese imports, consumers are facing more price inflation, says Gary Huffbauer at the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Also, HuffPower says U.S.

factories are hurting because of the decline in trade with China.

And as a result...

US agriculture is suffering, too, from the decline in exports due to China's trade retaliation.