💸 Consumers continue to spend like drunken sailors

🍻Plus, who wants to play my Boeing earnings call drinking game?

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*past 24-hour performance

📰 Market Headlines

  • Markets mostly wandered aimlessly yesterday as earnings continued to come in all over the place.

  • Two big economic reports came out yesterday.

    • Consumer confidence. Came in hot at 114.8 against estimates of 113 and 6.8 points higher than in December.

    • Job openings. Came in at 9.0 million against an estimated 8.7 million, up 200k from November.

  • Both these reports point to diminishing odds the Fed will cut rates meaningfully — if at all — in 2024.

  • Boeing reports earnings before the bell, and I’ll be updating my earnings call drinking game bingo card in anticipation. Qualcomm comes after markets close.

  • The Fed releases its rate decision today, but it’s super unlikely anything will change.

  • The global M&A market was off 15% last year, the lowest volume in ten years.

🕶️ Market Vibes

🎰 Market Forecasts and Futures

😱 Fear and Greed Index

🧠 What do you think?

Analysts expect a dire earnings report from Boeing today.

But what do you think, Hive Mind?

Boeing's earnings report today

Back your call in the comments

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

🎤 What you said last time

The Natural is the wrong answer, but I respect your decision.

📈 Trends you need to know

Search results are from our friends at Glimpse, my favorite way to spot trends.

The spikes you see are Boeing aircraft falling out of the sky.

📊 Stocks

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Winners and losers

Earnings, upgrades, and acquisitions

  • Alphabet beat overall revenue and earnings but missed on ad revenue. Shares down 5%.

  • Novo Nordisk guided up 18% to 25% yesterday off the back of 31% growth in 2023. Shares up 3.1%

  • Samsung reported a 35% drop in profit in Q4 and missed earnings badly. Shares were down 1.2%.

  • UPS beat on earnings but missed on revenue and lowered guidance. Shares crumbled 8%.

  • Meanwhile, GM’s report came in less horrific than expected, which sent shares up 8%.

  • Starbucks missed both earnings and revenue. The company blamed China and US boycotts.

Market movers

  • A Delaware judge voided Elon Musk’s $56 billion compensation package at Tesla, which sent shares down 3.6% for some reason. Poor guy.

  • NY State sued Citibank for allegedly failing to reimburse fraud victims.

  • Walmart announced a 3:1 split.

  • Layoffs:

    • Block is firing 1,000.

    • UPS is cutting 12,000.

    • PayPal is whacking 2,500.

  • Google One cloud storage now has nearly 100 million customers.

Ideas, trends, and analysis

  • The US tech sector is currently trading at 29× 2024 earnings estimates.

🌍 Global Perspectives

🇸🇦 Saudi Arabia’s economy contracted again in Q4, falling by 3.7%, which is an improvement over the 4.4% decline in Q3. “The drop was attributed to a 16.4% decline in oil activities, while non-oil activities and government activities expanded by 4.3% and 3.1%, respectively, year-on-year.”

🇸🇦 Meanwhile, the Kingdom is fighting a legal battle to avoid Congressional subpoenas.

🇨🇳 Chinese stocks are at a five-year low. Unrelated, Bejing is pumping out economic propaganda.

📊 Income

📊 Crypto

  • China is emerging as a source of BTC demand.

🧠 Errata

  • A few GPTs you may actually find useful.

  • The Tropicana in Vegas will be demolished to make room for a new MLB stadium.

📺 What to Watch Today

That’s all for today. Did I miss anything? Smash the reply button to let me know.

Cheers,

Wyatt