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.

“Today, we build a standard, and sell it multiple times. Can I take some of my portfolio here and customize it for three, four companies?”

I mentioned earlier this week that Nvidia’s CEO, Jensen Huang, was doing investor meetings in New York, and talking up the value of the AI “inference” market for his chips.

We got the full story on Thursday from Morgan Stanley’s Joseph Moore, who one who hosted those meetings.

Moore reports that “It's no surprise that management enthusiasm remains high both short term and long term, with the strong sense that there is still material growth ahead.” He, himself, is enthusiastic, reiterating an Overweight rating on the stock, and a $150 price target ($134.80 price at week’s end.)

Moore homes in on the same slide in the slide deck from Huang that I had mentioned, the one that suggested that the inference task is getting more copious in terms of its use of computing.

Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices on Thursday held a press conference in San Francisco to discuss its chip roadmap for artificial intelligence. Much like Tesla’s “robotaxi” event the same night, it was a non-event as far as traders are concerned. The stock traded down four percent Thursday, though it bounced back fractionally on Friday.

The main let-down for investors is that the company did not update its forecast for $4.5 billion in data center revenue from AI this year, which it had offered on its last earnings call, in late July. That is something that I noted last week investors were looking for.

The deeper let-down is that AMD’s parts, good as they are, don’t seem to yet bring AMD quite up to Nvidia’s level in terms of performance on AI tasks in the data center.

Tesla Thursday evening held its eagerly anticipated “robo-taxi” unveiling, and showed off three things: the robotaxi automobile, which looks like a gold version of the “Model 3” but even more stark, even more spare; a robovan that’s like a bus in the shape of an Art Deco suppository; and the latest incarnation of the “Optimus” robot, here re-branded as a “Tesla Bot” personal assistant.

There’s clearly nothing to juice the stock in all this — shares are down five percent in early trading Friday. As some predicted, this was a “sell-the-news” event.

CEO Elon Musk, onstage at Warner Bros.’s soundstage in Hollywood, got into the golden robotaxi via its butterfly doors (they open upward), and was whisked — presumably autonomously — through the fake urban streets of the soundstage. When you no longer have actors in movies, this is what you can do with a soundstage!

The robotaxi doesn’t go into production until “sometime before 2027,” said Musk. It is designed to be priced at $30,000 for fleet operators. It has neither steering wheel nor pedals. Before it arrives, Musk plans to introduce “unsupervised” self-driving into the Model 3 and “Model Y” next year, he said, in California and Texas, if the company gets permission.

It’s hard in chips if you’re not an AI company, which is why Qualcomm on Tuesday got a downgrade from Keybanc’s John Vinh: he’s no longer sure they’re an AI company.

Vinh, who just returned from Asia-Pacific for his quarterly check of the chip supply chain, reports that trends overall there are mixed for chip sales. “Analog commentary across multiple supply chain partners consistently indicated broad-based demand trends remain weak,” he writes, referring to sales into automobiles, consumer electronics, and industrial equipment.

Vinh cut his rating on chip maker Synaptics to Sector Weight from Overweight, warning that its business in automotive and smartphones is going to cause it to “underperform its IoT [Internet of Things] peers.”

“Scarce resources are becoming more and more scarce, worldwide […] While we all think AI will replace the engineering force, so far, it's actually done the opposite.”

Shares of Alphabet are down one percent Monday amidst a rather mixed news flow.

Heading into the earnings season, the prospects for advertising are looking better and better.

But anxiety about potential remedies to the anti-trust ruling against the company in August weighs on the shares. So does the prospect of search business slipping away under artificial intelligence incursions.

First, the positive. UBS’s Stephen Ju on Monday reiterates his Overweight position on Google shares, writing that his survey of the advertising market shows that “despite a slower start, ad budgets accelerated in Aug into Sep citing uplift from political, brand advertising recovery, and improved consumer sentiment.” He notes, too, that budgets have the potential to go higher in the final quarter of this year as marketers “gain greater clarity” about election outcomes, consumer confidence, and interest rates.

What do you do with a company that has hit a speed bump?

That’s the question confronted by two different perspectives this week on Snowflake. You may recall that in August, the company’s quarterly revenue growth showed a mild slowdown, and its forecast came in just slightly ahead of expectations, not as much as some would have liked, prompting the shares to sell off.

Should you continue to have patience with the stock? Consider two dueling points of view.

Monday, Joe Bonner of Argus Research started coverage of Snowflake with a Hold rating, writing that the company is “in a building phase,” which means it’s “investing in new product enhancements, particularly around artificial intelligence/machine learning that are not generating near-term revenue though may begin payoff sometime in the future.” He wants to see not only higher revenue growth but also “renewed traction in the company's customer metrics and margins” before he considers upgrading the stock.

Is artificial intelligence headed for the dreaded “AI winter?”

An AI winter means a funding drought, when investors pull back in a big way, starving the field of capital. It happened numerous times over the decades when the promise of AI failed to live up to very hyped expectations.

An AI winter is a distinct possibility, according to one of the most respected professors at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In a report Tuesday, Bloomberg’s Jaren Wittenstein interviewed Daron Acemoglu, Institute Professor at MIT, who believes that artificial intelligence won’t meet expectations for automating all of business tasks.

AI will automate, or “at least heavily aide,” he contends, “only a small percent of all jobs — a mere 5%.”

That is not enough, argues Acemoglu, to pay for all the money being poured into the technology. And so, a negative scenario will ensue for the economy when all the tens of billions of dollars invested in AI end up yielding very little practical gain.

The group of human capital technology stocks, lead by forty-eight billion-dollar Paychex, and including Dayforce and Paylocity, at about nine billion in market cap, and tiny Paycor, at two billion, have been trying to keep their jobs with investors, showing off promising initiatives while their growth has sagged.

Mizuho Securities’ Siti Panigrahi reports talking with the companies while attending something call the HR Technology Conference a week ago in Las Vegas (who know you could spend an entire week in Las Vegas listening to talks about payroll and onboarding?)

All four of these companies have seen growth slow in a tough environment for enterprise software spending. Paychex, which makes about five billion dollars a year, may see less than five percent revenue growth for the fiscal year ending in May. The other three are looking at growth rates of between eleven and thirteen percent — on a far smaller base of revenue. That is down from rates of growth of twenty to forty percent a couple years ago.

O! The Metaverse!

Remember that bit of nonsense, from three years ago? Deep in the pandemic lockdowns, it seemed we all would be living in a digital cave for the rest of eternity. The Metaverse was the signature of Facebook’s transformation into Meta Platforms.

What actually came about were waves of layoffs and massive share buybacks, which this year have boosted the stock sixty percent.

The Metaverse stuff is now very dated, and has been replaced with some other ambitions.

On Thursday, the company, at its developer conference showed off a cheaper version of its virtual reality headset, the “Quest 3S,” which is $300 versus the original Quest 3, introduced earlier this year, at $500.

Shares of memory-chip maker Micron Technology are surging in early trading by eighteen percent after the company delivered quarterly results and outlook that crushed consensus, and also qualitative remarks that cast some doubt on skepticism about over-supply in Micron’s market in coming years.

It has been a roller-coaster month for those trying to handicap the near-term results for Micron. The company’s CEO, Sanjay Mehrotra, had said at Deutsche Bank’s technology conference last month that shipments of DRAM would be flat in the current quarter, the fiscal first quarter that began this month. On last night’s conference call, the company revised that outlook, saying shipments will actually rise, in large part because of demand from data center server computers requiring more memory.

That’s just one quarter. More substantively, the company’s extended question-and-answer with the analysts seemed to put to rest the worst concerns that the company’s business may be facing a huge over-supply of memory chips.

I don’t blame you if you’re a bit queasy at the title of this article, as it sounds like the latest overblown Marvel Comics movie franchise. But, “Age of AI Agents” is a good rubric for what’s happening at this very moment in the world of artificial intelligence software.

That development has significance for public software companies, including Salesforce and Hubspot. Both firms held their annual conferences last week to promote their new wares to their customers. Salesforce unveiled something called an AI-driven “sales agent” and an “AI sales coach” to train salespeople, both of which I wrote about on ZDNet when they were in preview.

Hubspot, which, like Salesforce, sells software for “customer relationship management,” or CRM, unveiled a whole slew of AI features and functions, collectively dubbed “Breeze,” including various agents such as a “social media agent” that can automatically post on behalf of a company on social networks.

Gil Shwed co-founded Check Point Software Technologies thirty-one years ago based on his unique understanding of how to engineer the technology of firewalls as a robust defense in a networked age. As he turns over the baton in December to Nadav Zafrir, a career venture capitalist, entrepreneur and manager, Shwed plans to return to his roots, reflecting deeply on today’s landscape of threats to develop the next technologies that are needed.

In a wide-ranging video edition of the podcast, Shwed reflects on how he will spend his time as Check Point’s executive chairman, the challenges to Check Point’s growth, the role of artificial intelligence in cyber-security, and the continued waves of consolidation in the industry. Below is the full transcript of the podcast.

Shares of Intel are up three percent Monday following Friday’s report by The Wall Street Journal that the company was approached for a merger by Qualcomm, followed by a report late Sunday by Bloomberg’s Liana Baker, Ryan Gould and Ian King that alternative asset manager Apollo Global Management “offered to make a multibillion-dollar investment in Intel as a “vote of confidence in its turnaround strategy.”

The overall tenor of the Street response to the Qualcomm speculation is negative, seeing a deal as unlikely for multiple reasons, from financial and regulatory.

Stacy Rasgon of Bernstein, in a note humorously titled “Bonfire of the Vanities,” says the same thing I wrote on Saturday, which is that Qualcomm doesn’t seem to be an answer to Intel’s main issue, getting its factories back to leading-edge.

Shares of Intel jumped three percent Friday as The Wall Street Journal’s Lauren Thomas, Laura Cooper and Asa Fitch reported that Qualcomm has approached Intel about acquiring it for perhaps as much as ninety billion dollars, citing multiple unnamed sources.

The “massive” deal, as the authors put it, is financially daunting, as Qualcomm has just thirteen billion in cash and equivalents on its balance sheet against thirteen billion of long-term debt. Even a mostly-stock exchange would require some large debt raise. Intel, moreover, already has nineteen billion dollars of net long-term debt.

The deal is much larger than the proposed acquisition of NXP Semiconductor in 2016 for $38 billion. That was initiated at a time when Qualcomm had an enormous amount of cash trapped overseas prior to the 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that let Qualcomm bring it back to the U.S. (Qualcomm ultimately spent twenty-two billion of it on buybacks when the NXP deal was canceled.)