Chapter 1: What were the highlights of large cap tech earnings this week?
Brian Stewart, Seeking Alpha's stalwart director of news. The last episode of January. It's a doozy. We got a lot to talk about.
Yeah, there's a lot going on.
Welcome back to the show.
Chapter 2: Why did health insurance stocks experience a significant drop?
Thank you very much.
Talk to us.
Chapter 3: What positive trends are emerging in the travel and leisure sector?
Earnings, new Fed chair, brouhaha galore.
Yeah, I think jumping on earnings, right?
Chapter 4: What earnings reports are anticipated next week?
So we had a bunch of big name earnings. We had Microsoft, we had Meta, Apple, Tesla.
Chapter 5: Who is the new Fed Chair and what are the implications?
this past week, kind of the meat of the earnings season getting going. I think it's interesting to look at Microsoft and Meta as a pair. Both companies beat expectations.
Chapter 6: How does the latest macroeconomic data influence market sentiment?
Both companies revealed higher CapEx spending. For Meta, they're now spending $17 billion in the past quarter. For R&D, that's 41% growth from last year. It was $15 billion in Q3, it was $13 billion in Q2. Back when Meta changed its name from Facebook to Meta, in that specific quarter, they had spent $6 billion on R&D. So you can just see them constantly cranking up the amount they're spending.
Meanwhile, the stocks, Microsoft and Meta, went in different directions.
Chapter 7: What challenges is Tesla facing after its recent earnings report?
So... Microsoft was down 10%. Meta was up about 10%. And so there's kind of an interesting dichotomy in how the market was reacting to what seems on the surface is relatively similar news. I think one thing to look at is just the relative placement that Microsoft stock and Meta stock had going into the earnings report.
So as of the end of 2025, Microsoft was up 17% over a one-year basis and Meta was down 4%.
Chapter 8: Why is consumer confidence at a low point despite economic indicators?
So you had more of a optimistic view of Microsoft's prospects as we were closing out 2025. And then going into the earnings report, you saw Meta rise five out of the six sessions headed into the earnings report. And you see it pop with the earnings coming out. And so I just think you're seeing Microsoft and Meta kind of converging. You're seeing the market pricing them sort of similarly.
in terms of where they are in the upgrade cycle. I think you're also seeing a little bit more optimism about the kind of blocking and tackling that
um meta is doing versus microsoft is sort of the the core business as opposed to the projections for ai going forward so um you see in meta's earnings report it's basic figure so average revenue per person was 16.56 16.56 for um the fourth quarter that's up 16 from last year they've now had 10 straight quarters of double digit growth in that area that figure was at $9.57 in Q1 of 2022.
So you're seeing it rise pretty strongly over the last several years. Meanwhile, at Microsoft, they're still having solid growth in their cloud space, which has been the driver recently. That seems like it might be starting to hit a peak. So there's a little bit of worry at Microsoft that they're kind of reaching the peak
their ceiling there, where at Meta, I think the idea is they're doing a great job executing on their core business. And they also have this investment piece, this AI piece that is on the horizon still. So I think just in the place where the stocks were, I think you're just seeing a slight recalibration of people's expectations.
I mean, just because they're big names, I think we should jump into Tesla and Apple. Tesla was down a little on its earnings report. It initially popped and then kind of faded as the day went on. The stock in general is hovering off its highs. As a car company, and this is sort of the story of Tesla over the last several years. So as a car company, it's pretty meh, right?
It's a niche car producer. It's nowhere near somebody like a Ford or a GM. It's being passed by some of its EV rivals in terms of deliveries. Both deliveries and production were down in the fourth quarter. But in terms of the stock price, in terms of your average Tesla investor, and certainly in terms of Elon Musk's vision for the company.
It's presented more as a technology company, broadly speaking. And so this earnings report had sort of that story embedded in it. Like I said, you have the declines in terms of deliveries and production, but you also see the company making... real material shifts towards some of the other products that they've been touting as being on the horizon for a while.
So you're seeing the company halt model SX production, give that manufacturing capacity to the Optimus human robot. You're also seeing the company highlight progress that it's making on robo taxis and proprietary AI chips. So you're continuing to see the company
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