Chip giant Qualcomm held its “analyst day” event on Tuesday in New York, the kinds of meetings with the Street where there is a feel-good vibe about future potential, and a selection of financial targets. The targets seemed to have underwhelmed most observers, and the stock rose just fractionally.

Qualcomm has been for years now trying to focus investor attention on the parts of its business that are not selling chips into smartphones, namely, automotive chips and the Internet of Things. Some of what management said on Tuesday was a repeat of what was said during the previous analyst day event in September of 2022, so it may not have been enough to move the ball forward.

• The week that ended November 15th was a poor one for stocks, with The Nasdaq Composite Index falling 3%, the S&P 500 down 2%, and the TL20 group of twenty great companies whose shares are worth considering, falling worse than the market, down 5% on weakness that included Nvidia.

• While larger names such as Applied Materials struggled, some small cap names such as cybersecurity firm CyberArk really delighted folks.

• A very prominent name that topped the list of gains last week was Bloom Energy, makers of alternative energy products, fuel-cell products. it was highlighted in an interview that I did a year ago with Paul Wick, the fund manager of the Columbia Seligman Group of Funds.

This week’s earnings reports bring three heavy-hitters on Wednesday evening: Nvidia, Snowflake, and Palo Alto Networks — all three of them being part of the TL20 group of stocks worth considering.

Nvidia’s report comes amidst rising estimates and price targets, but also newly reported problems with its forthcoming “Blackwell” GPU chips for artificial intelligence.

The shares are down two points Monday, and are down four percent in the past week, as Qianer Liu and Anissa Gardizy with The Information reported over the weekend that Nvidia “has asked its suppliers to change the design” of integrated computer “racks” it sells with the Blackwell chips because of “overheating problems,” citing unnamed Nvidia employees, customers and suppliers.”

Thursday saw two upbeat presentations by chip equipment giants, but neither presentation did much for the near-term outlook for an industry that’s been in a slump.

In the morning, ASML Holding, the monopoly producer of lasers for etching circuits, held its “analyst day” event, a gathering of stock analysts to hear the company’s promises for the years to come. In the evening, Applied Materials reported its fiscal fourth quarter.

Both companies, and peers such as Lam Research, KLA Corp., Tokyo Electron, and Teradyne, are dealing with uncertainty about how much their customers such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing will spend. The official view, from the industry trade group, SEMI, is that the total market for “wafer fab equipment,” or, WFE, will rise almost three percent this year, and fifteen percent next year.

This has been another good earnings week for small, young companies, echoing the surge in shares of AppLovin last week.

This week’s stars include CyberArk Software, the thirteen-billion-dollar maker of security and “DevOps” software, whose shares are up five percent on Thursday following Wednesday evening’s report; dLocal, the three-billion-dollar online payments purveyor, surging fifteen percent on Wednesday’s report; Paymentus Holdings, the four-billion-dollar maker of cloud-based billing software, which soared twenty-seven percent on Wednesday following Tuesday night’s report; and Rocket Lab, the nine-billion-dollar maker of launch systems for putting satellites in space, which shot up twenty-eight percent on Wednesday following its own bullish report on Tuesday.

“The grid is being asked to do things it just wasn't inherently designed to do … We’re asking it to do basically everything in our lives.”

Thought for the day: Investing in gold was better than equities for almost a quarter century stretching back to 2000. That’s the main takeaway from a sixty-four-page report published by Deutsche Bank economist Jim Reid on Tuesday.

Reid looks at real equity returns dating back to the start of 1999 and finds that gold’s return of 6.8% beats the return of 4.9% of U.S.-listed equities — the first time gold’s been better in all the quarter centuries going back to 1800. (The actual start of the quarter century was on January 1st of 2000, notes Reid, so there’s actually one more year for equities to pull it out.)

It’s nicely laid out in one chart:

• The week that ended November 8th, the week that Donald Trump won election to the White House, saw strong gains for stocks. The Nasdaq Composite Index closing the week up 6%, the S&P 500, up 5%, and the TL20 group of stocks worth considering, up 7%.

• Some stocks have been out of favor saw big gains, including Tesla, up 29%, and Coinbase, which benefited from the perceived favorability of Trump towards crypto-currency, ending the week up 48%, giving it a 56% gain this year.

• However, a lot of things that were already good gainers surged even more.

• They include AppLovin, which is a company that makes, both video games, but also software tools to let games makers include advertising in their apps, up 77% for the week; and IonQ, a quantum computing hopeful, up 67 last week.

• Two other gainers that added to incredible increases this year were Reddit, the social media site that went public in the spring; and Astera Labs, a bandwidth memory technology company that's been a darling of AI momentum investors.

Of course you’re wondering how the main competitors to Tesla did this earnings week, Rivian Automotive, Lucid Group, and Faraday Future Intelligent Electric.

There are no estimates for Gardena, California-based Faraday, because no analysts formally cover their stock. Of the other two, Rivian missed expectations while Lucid came in above consensus. Rivian and Faraday are both ending the week lower, while Lucid notches a small gain.

It’s been a terrible year for all three stocks, down forty percent for Lucid, forty-two percent for Rivian, and ninety-nine percent for Faraday, which now trades at $1.73.

This quarter showed the same struggling situation for all three: “sub-scale,” in the sense of producing far fewer vehicles than Tesla, losing massive amounts of money, and struggling to introduce cheaper models to boost sales.

Thursday’s earnings basket is filled chills, thrills and spills.

The star is Palo Alto, California-based software maker AppLovin, its shares soaring forty-five percent following Wednesday evening’s better-than-expected report and outlook.

AppLovin, in case you’re unaware, is a sort of hybrid, making casual games for mobile such as Wordscapes, as well as tools for other mobile app developers to do things such as run targeted ads inside of apps to lure new users.

The company has been a darling this year, with price targets rising of late. This is the fourth quarterly report in a row in which the stock flew double-digits, and the biggest jump so far.

The centerpiece of the report is e-commerce, the company’s forthcoming offering to allow parties globally to sell ads through apps.

Global Foundries, which competes with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing and Samsung Electronics to fabricate the world’s chips, saw its shares surge six percent on Wednesday morning, following better-than-expected results Wednesday evening.

The appeal is likely more than the numbers, though they’re alright. It’s probably also a bet on the second presidency of Donald Trump, who swept the U.S. presidential election on Tuesday.

Global, as it is sometimes referred to, has two prominent manufacturing facilities in the U.S., one in the upstate New York town of Malta (just above the capital of Albany), and one in Burlington, Vermont. Those two facilities are in addition to factories in Singapore and Dresden, Germany.

• The week that ended November 1st was a mixed one for stocks with the Nasdaq Composite index trading down 1%.

• But the overall takeaway for tech was a good one as cloud computing giants, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet’s Google, and Meta Platforms all indicated that their commitment to spending on cloud computing and artificial intelligence remains strong.

• That is good news for Nvidia, and others such as Arista Networks.

• All of the giants indicated strong double-digit growth for their cloud computing businesses. Microsoft was the only one that was a little soft. Its shares fell 4% last week. Google, on the other hand, closed the week up 3.6%, and Amazon for the week was up 5%.

• The results caused numerous analysts to revise upward their expectations for capital spending. Capital spending is a very big bucket, but generally is taken as a sign of health of cloud computing and of AI these days.

Would you believe me if I told you the only thing that seems to be working in earnings at the moment is artificial intelligence?

Yes, it’s getting a little tired, isn’t it? But it is undeniable.

Shares of Astera Labs, which came public in the spring, and whose chips tie into AI server systems, is up thirty-five percent on Tuesday following Monday evening’s better-than-expected report and outlook.

And Palantir, the shadowy software firm that makes something for AI — they never talk about it, and I’m sure no one who owns the stock really knows what they do — is up twenty-two percent, following what analysts consider a “blowout” report last night.

Everything else is in the dumps: four chip makers, Cirrus Logic, Lattice Semi, Navitas, and NXP Semiconductor — all got hit with some form of the slumping markets for chips, either for smartphones or for automobiles or for industrial products, producing unimpressive forecasts. Their shares are selling off in response.

With the main buyers of cloud and artificial intelligence reporting last week — Alphabet’s Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta Platforms — the outlook for the vendors of cloud and artificial intelligence equipment, such as Nvidia, is looking pretty darned good.

Next year’s spending may be as much as three hundred billion dollars from the four, a stunning amount. (That includes not just buying Nvidia GPUs but also building and leasing data center space for ordinary cloud activities, mind you.)

Across all four companies, “against the backdrop of an ‘AI arms race,’ capex [capital spending] results for the calendar third quarter were above consensus by roughly four percent,” notes William Blair’s Sebastian Naji.

After a fifty-seven percent decline in Intel stock this year, the shares are up five percent in Friday-morning trading, but it probably won’t last.

There was bound to be a relief rally of sorts, with Intel Thursday evening beating quarterly revenue expectations slightly after two quarters of misses, and its forecast for the current quarter topping expectations after three lower-than-expected forecasts. Those estimates by the Street had dropped by billions of dollars in recent months, hence, an easier bar for Intel to cross.

As I look around, no one is convinced that Intel is now “off to the races,” as they say.

The challenges that I mentioned in February, that of catching up in processor design with Advanced Micro Devices, regaining manufacturing leadership, and becoming competitive on artificial intelligence, are all still question marks.

Shares of Twilio, which powers ride-share services such as Uber and Lyft, have been truly a dog for a long time now, the five-year annualized return being negative six percent.

Wednesday evening, after the third-quarter report, the stock had a nice twelve-point gain in late trading, which builds upon an eleven-point gain back in early August.

Is something finally going right for the company? Perhaps this little pop won’t last, but there are reasons for hope. The company is planning an analyst day meeting in January, the first such meeting since November of 2022, which is taken as a sign of confidence on the Street.

And, the company offered its first look at 2025’s financials, promising revenue growth of seven to eight percent, which would be in line with consensus, and a big step up from the six percent this year is expected to bring.

Never a good thing when your auditor resigns the very first time they’ve looked at your books, which is the case with Ernst & Young, which has stepped away from Super Micro Computer after beginning to audit the company’s financial statements for the fiscal year that ended in June.

Super Micro said in an 8-K filing Wednesday that E&Y informed them on October 24th that they are resigning after being contracted in March of last year. E&Y had expressed concern to the board of Super Micro in July, which lead to the appointment of a forensic investigator. E&Y said it is what that forensic investigator turned up that has caused E&Y “to no longer be able to rely on management's and the Audit Committee’s representations.”

All of this is comes in the wake of the August announcement by Super Micro that it had to delay filing its annual report, and the short-selling attack on the stock at that time, and a report by The Wall Street Journal last month that the U.S. Department of Justice is probing the company’s server sales.

Expectations finally got low enough for fiber-optics titan Corning that the company was able to blow past expectations Tuesday morning. The stock is up seven percent in response.

Corning has struggled with built-up inventories in its market for quite some time now, and that has depressed its outlook for a while now. Tuesday was a turn-around.

There’s also an important message about artificial intelligence in Corning’s results, so stick with me.

Corning’s quarterly forecasts have been weak for a long time now, but the forecast range for earnings this quarter, 53 cents to 57 cents, is five percent higher than consensus for 52 cents — the strongest upside in over two years.

• Earnings are now underway in earnest, and the first full week of earnings, the week ending October 25th, was a pretty darn good one.

• Results from Tesla, Texas Instruments, Western Digital, Lam Research, and BE Semiconductor. Tesla shares soared 22% for the week, Texas instruments was up 4%, Western Digital, 3%, BE Semiconductor up fractionally, and Lam Research up almost 7% for the week.

• The Nasdaq Composite Index was up fractionally for the week, but the TL20 group of stocks to consider beat the market, up 1%. TL20 names that rose included Lam but also ServiceNow, up 3%, and Nvidia, up almost 3% for the week.

The world of semiconductors has created some special situations given that the only thing that’s been working consistently is the artificial intelligence part of the market.

Thursday’s earnings reports brought some mild good news for two special situations.

The good news coming out of Western Digital’s earnings report Thursday night was two-fold. One, the company is on track for a planned split of its hard-disk drive business from its NAND flash memory-chip business, and, the company signaled the NAND market remains healthy.

Western shares rose ten percent in early trading Friday follow Thursday evening’s report — the first gain on results following three quarters of the stock selling off after each press release.

The stand-out in Thursday evening’s earnings reports was doubtless Tesla, whose shares surged by twelve percent in late trading. The company’s revenue actually came in slightly below Street consensus, at $25.18 billion versus $25.46 billion expected. But it was the gross profit margin, 19.8%, that really wowed, better than consensus for perhaps 17%.

The gross profit margin of 16.4% for just the car part of the business, excluding the energy storage, was also higher than some were expecting by a couple points.

Remarks by CEO Elon Musk about growth in 2025 were also heartening. He said the company intends to deliver twenty to thirty percent more vehicles in 2025. That was “materially above our/consensus expectations,” notes Deutsche Bank’s Edison Yu. “While we won’t give full credit to Tesla for achieving such levels, this should alleviate concerns about the trajectory next year,” he concludes.

Shares of Qualcomm are up four percent Wednesday afternoon, and shares of ARM Holdings are down almost eight percent after the latter put the former on notice that ARM will revoke Qualcomm’s right to use ARM’s intellectual property if Qualcomm does not renegotiate terms.

The price action tells you what the conventional wisdom is here: Qualcomm will ultimately reach a settlement, and ARM will have to settle for less than exactly what it wants.

The issue is that Qualcomm in March of 2021 acquired a startup chip design team, Nuvia, for $1.4 billion, which already had a license with ARM, just like Qualcomm has a license with ARM. ARM insists Qualcomm needs to re-negotiate with ARM rather than simply adopt the terms that Nuvia had with ARM.

The earnings season is moving into full gear, and the results from Tuesday evening show that renewable energy is still a dog of a market but semiconductor investors may be focusing on the upturn.

Shares of Enphase, which dominates the market for home solar panel “micro-inverters,” and which competes with Tesla, is down thirteen percent after missing with its reported results for the quarter ended September 30th, and also missing with its results and outlook.

Enphase and other vendors have been struggling for two years with a pile-up of inventories of solar energy equipment, globally, that must be cleared amidst dampened demand before sales growth can resume.

Some think the AI stock trade is rather long in the tooth heading into this earnings season. In particular, the bar has been raised for hardware makers such as fiber-optic component vendors, notes Samik Chatterjee of JP Morgan in a note out Monday.

Chatterjee zeroes in on fiber-optics names Lumentum and Coherent. He in fact puts Lumentum on a “Negative Catalyst Watch” for earnings season, but he’s cautious about Coherent as well. Both of them have elevated stock valuations. Coherent is trading for thirty-four times projected profit per share, which is an eighty-nine percent premium to its five-year average of 18 times, he notes. And Lumentum is trading for 41.6 times, a premium of a hundred and thirty-eight.

Netflix shares are rising by nine percent early Friday after the company Thursday evening beat with its revenue and profit, and forecast 2025’s revenue will be about in line with consensus, and that operating profit will continue to expand.

This was a turn-around from the last report, July 18th, when the shares sold off slightly as the revenue outlook at the time came up short. (I would note that Netflix shares rose over seven percent from then to now, which was better than the Nasdaq in that time, so, buying the stock after the selloff was a good tactic.)

It’s worth asking, however, whether the company’s trends have in some sense stalled. At least one observer is asking that.

• As I record this, Nvidia shares have risen 20% in the past month, a sign that people have gotten over the concerns that perhaps too much was priced into the artificial intelligence trade since Nvidia’s last earnings report in late August.

• All of this has been helped by some of the major investment banking firms holding conferences with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, boosting investor confidence.

• In the roughly one-month period from September 13th through October 11th, The Nasdaq Composite Index is up 3.7%.

• There's been a broad rally in tech in the past month, and a lot of it has come to a head with the in with the AI trade.

Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing are surging by eleven percent on Thursday after the company this morning reported better-than-expected results for its third quarter and forecast this quarter’s revenue as much as two billion dollars higher than the Street has been looking for.

This is an enormous relief coming two days after chip equipment maker ASML told the Street that much of the chip world is still struggling to recover, outside of the AI trade.

Taiwan Semi’s results are giving a lift to the AI trade names, with Nvidia up two percent, with the company’s chief saying AI demand is “insane.”

One of the misconceptions that quickly circulated on Tuesday, following the sixteen-percent collapse of chip-equipment maker ASML, was that the company’s issues were a reflection on the artificial intelligence trade, stocks linked to AI. Shares of Nvidia and others sold off hard.

But, Wednesday, AI stocks are bouncing back. Nvidia is up two percent, and Micron Technology is up nearly four percent, even as ASML slips another six percent.

The AI trade is alive and well, it turns out.

“I think today, without AI, the market would be very sad, if you ask me,” said ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet on the conference call Wednesday morning.

Shares of chip equipment maker ASML plunged sixteen percent on Tuesday, to $730.43, after the company reported revenue that was above expectations, but lower-than-expected equipment orders, and cut its full-year revenue outlook a full ten percent below what the Street had been modeling.

All the equipment stocks dropped sharply Tuesday, with Applied Materials, Lam Research, KLA and others dropping by ten percent or more.

The bad news was made worse by the fact that the numbers leaked onto the company’s investor relations Web site early, on Tuesday, mid-day, having been scheduled originally for release on Wednesday morning.

The immediate question is how badly this will hurt credibility of the newly installed CEO, Christophe Fouquet, who, as recently as July, had painted a rosy picture of the latter part of this year and into next year.