Today:
Market Rundown
Amazon
Founders Friday
Zen Moment: Scorned-Woman Car Detailing
1- Market Rundown
Good Morning. The DX is up 54 vs G7 nations. Bonds are stronger especially in the backs, creating more (recessionary) inversion. Gold is down $5. pinned between $1985 and $2010. Silver Fu. are down 11c hovering at $25.10. Oil is up 43c. Nat Gas is down 5c. Grains are mixed with apparently Corn’s turn to take a dive down 7%1 (?). Soy up 5c and Wheat unchanged.
Yesterday we were invited to hang with the best grain people and discuss dedollarization with Angie Setzer of Consus and the Ag crew. Angie is a long time mutual on Twitter (follow her) and someone we go to for anything trading and fundamental in the Ag space. Happy to meet the crew. Thanks Angie.
Crypto is weaker somewhat.
2- Amazonian Disaster?
The big story so far is Amazon. Post yesterday’s close, earnings came out and the stock rocketed upwards 12% immediately in after hours trading. But then melted away actually going negative on the day.
For our part this is what we thought happened in very broad strokes:
Earnings killed, stock explodes. Somebody heard something they did not like about the future outlook on the analyst’s call and dumped their holdings. We suspected it was either cloud business concerns, or a lack of AI focus.
Here is an excerpt from Zerohedge’s coverage narrowing it down to likely being Cloud risks:
Update (6:00pm): Everything was going ok, with AMZN stock soaring as much as 12% and then suddenly AMZN stock erased all gains and turned red during the company's analyst earnings call (the media call held an hour earlier went by ok).
There was initially some confusion what sparked the plunge, but it eventually was revealed that during the call, Amazon said that “Customers continue to evaluate ways to optimize their cloud spending in response to these tough economic conditions in Q1 and we are seeing these optimizations continue into Q2 with April revenue growth rates about 500bps lower than what we saw in Q1."
The company tried to provide some favorable spin with the CEO saying that he is "pretty optimistic that we have a chance not just to recover to where we were pre-pandemic in terms of operating margin, but I think there is additional upside with some of the opportunities we've identified" but by now it was too little too late, and the stock had erased all of its earlier gains and was on the verge of turning red for the day.
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Have a great weekend.
3- FOUNDERS FRIDAY
One Friday a month...
Metals: Miners in Focus
Oil: Down but not out
Retail: Credit card use is up for Easter, but down in general
Apple vs Huweii phones: Apple loses ground
Google, Meta, Microsoft: feels like the next ESG signaling is “AI Utopia”
Continues below