Welcome back, everyone. Today on the Joseph Carlson
Show, we're wrapping up one of the biggest and most exciting
weeks in the market with companies like Apple, Meta,
Microsoft and Amazon just having reported their earnings.
We're going to look over the earnings.
I'll be reviewing them, going piece by piece looking at what
these companies actually did. We know that we had the quick
takeaways that always happen after earnings, everybody
looking at the incremental stock price change, and that's
exciting. But I think it's good to take a
little bit of a deeper look to look at the real picture of how
these companies are developing. And that's what we're going to
be going through here. We're going to look at what's
actually going on with Amazon, how this business is developing,
whether investors should be more bullish on this company after
this earnings or less. We'll be doing the same for
Apple, Microsoft, and Meta. A full review giving clarity
over these companies reports. These companies are all massive,
complex businesses that have a lot going on, even to the
investor to study them. There's a lot of developments
that are being missed. On top of that, we also have
some other news to get to. For example, the jobs report
came in last week. It was a bit higher than
expected. Unemployment rate remains
steady. We'll be going over that.
We have Apple now making way for Spotify and other applications
to make it easier to avoid the Apple App Store.
Could this be the beginning of the erosion of the App Store
monopoly that they've held for years?
And then finally, we also had the news that Grand Theft Auto 6
was delayed yet again, this time until May of 2026.
Is this the most highly anticipated product of all time?
We'll be discussing as well. We have all of that plus much
more to get into. This is going to be a huge
episode. And on a side note, if you want
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So try it out if you haven't. I think you'll love it.
Now let's go ahead and jump in to this week, which this was a
very important week. We know that we faced a lot of
uncertainty in the market through tariffs.
That's been the headline news for weeks now.
As a a content creator or someone that talks about the
news, really all I've heard over and over again in the stock
market is tariffs, tariffs and tariffs uncertainty.
In fact, I've heard a lot of chatter about American
exceptionalism evaporating, the stock market declining.
There's people projecting this out years in the future, saying
that basically this great thing that the US has built over
decades of time, these wonderful companies, the success that
we've had in the stock market here is over, and it's over
because of the tariff policy. Now, going into this week, this
was a test. It was a test to see if that
narrative would hold up in the face of these great companies.
And that test showed that the narrative wasn't quite accurate.
Many people over extrapolated and overestimated the negative
news and the investors that bought the dip and held to their
plan ended up winning once again.
If we look at the market today, it is green.
In the past one month period, it's in the green.
So basically the entire month of April, this terrible month where
it dropped 10% in two days, we are flat over the month.
If you were to fall asleep and go into a coma and just wake up
a month later, you wouldn't really be able to recognize what
happened to your portfolio. Only living through it day by
day, were you able to have that concern, feel that pressure, but
just holding out a little bit longer.
You're not able to see it in the results.
In the past year to date, the S&P 500 is down 3.1%.
This is normal. This is just normal trading.
As far as the stock market's concerned, it's not really
concerned at all. In fact, zooming out one year,
we're up 12%, which is the annualized return of the stock
market on a one year trailing basis.
Even when we zoom into the QQQ now over time, the S&P 500 is
becoming more similar to the QQQ, so it's not quite as
different. It's down 4% year to date, Very
similar results. When I look at My Portfolio, it
shows a very similar picture. The story funds up 3.6% year to
date. The passive income portfolio, my
much bigger portfolio is up .09% year to date.
And I'm not alone in this. A lot of people have their
portfolios in the green year to date.
The people that stayed in the market and especially the ones
that bought the dip. There's different voices you can
listen to in the stock market and that does help direct your
decisions. There's the voices of people
like Ray Dalio who sells books based around market crashes
around saying that there's so many problems with the United
States all the time that you should be wary and concerned.
He thrives off of negative news, goes on to interviews talking
about a reordering of the entire universe.
He does this continually and his track record is that over the
past couple of decades he's underperformed the benchmark
index. Both of his flagship portfolios
have dramatically underperformed the S&P 500.
Or you can listen to people like Peter Lynch, who outperformed
the market dramatically over an 11 year period, having an
annualized 33% returns. His advice is to ignore these
people. Ignore the macro to invest in
great companies, forget about the macro.
Buy stocks that you know will grow earnings over time and
you'll have good results. He says that there's always
something to worry about. Every single time, every
situation, every decade, there's stuff to worry about in the
market. Peter Lynch instructs investors
to push those concerns aside. He says that money is made by
the stomach, not by the brain. The people that can have a
strong stomach and stay invested even though there's uncertainty,
even though there's scary times happening, are the ones that end
up making money. The reason that I continue to
invest the way that I do, the reason that I continue to buy
high quality companies and hold on, no matter the macro
environment, no matter the tariffs, no matter what news is
going on, no matter the projections and predictions that
people are making, is because I agree with the people like Peter
Lynch. I disagree with the people like
Ray Dalio. And I believe strongly the
evidence shows that the investors that follow the Peter
Lynches make more money than the ones that follow the Ray Dalios.
If you got concerned a month ago and sold your stocks at the lows
of April, then you likely dramatically damage your
returns. Holding on through those time
periods and especially buying more of quality companies during
those time periods is the better strategy.
And there's going to be more of this in the future.
This isn't the last scare the market's going to go through.
Eventually there will be more economic news and certainty
policy news, something that scares investors.
Once again, like Peter Lynch notes, it's easy to buy high
quality companies. Anyone can do that.
The tough part is not getting scared out of them.
Now with that said, let's take a look at some of the earnings
that really turned around this market.
Out of the companies we'll be going over today, which is
Apple, Ameta, Microsoft and Amazon, the one that really
turned the market around was Microsoft.
Microsoft is up today another 2 1/2% to $436.
This company was 350 just a couple weeks ago.
In fact, year to date, Microsoft is up 4%.
Biggest company in the world or very close to it with Apple is
now 4% in the green. Over the past one month it's up
16.6%. Microsoft going up is a big
deal, not just for Microsoft, not just because the vastness of
this company or the market cap. This has knock on effects to
entirely different markets. Microsoft is a weathervane of
all of US, business, business to business applications, software.
If we look at Microsoft going up, this had a direct impact on
Salesforce. We look at Salesforce, for
example, this stock's up 2.36%, and you'll see these effects
spread across industries because Microsoft is so emblematic of
the rest of the market. When we look at Microsoft, one
interesting thing to note is I talk about Google a lot on this
channel. We just review Google.
We go over Google a lot because there's a lot to discuss, but
one of the sleeper companies in My Portfolio overall, Microsoft,
is a larger position across both of my portfolios.
In Google, in the passive income portfolio, it's a $71,000
position. In the Story fund, it's a
$22,000 position. Now, what did Microsoft do in
this report that was deserving of an 8% update followed by a 2
1/2% update? Well, they just did everything
right. The company is the poster child
of the perfect fundamentals. It's a company that has so many
levers to pull, but they did all the most important things right.
Not only did they be on the top line revenue and earnings per
share estimate like they usually do, but the more significant
part was the Microsoft Cloud and AI.
This is top of mind for investors.
It showed record quarter driven by Microsoft Cloud, which
surpassed $42 billion in revenue, up 22% in constant
currency. So we still have a 22% growth
rate here. Significant progress in
expanding data center capacity. They open in 10 countries,
boosting efficiency, reducing GPU lead times and cost cutting
per token for AI workloads. AI and cloud are considered
central to enabling business productivity, cost reductions
and growth. Demand for cloud migrations is
accelerating across industries and workloads.
We're into this AI transformation and the narrative
that's being portrayed now from these CE OS is we're not like
wrapping it up or even like 70 or 80% through it.
It's just getting started. We're really on the way, just
beginning this AI transition accelerating across industries.
We have Microsoft maintaining its lead in regional
availability, supporting mission critical workloads.
They mentioned constraints, saying clear demand and growth
in AI infrastructure are leading to some temporary capacity
constraints. The company is highly focused on
balancing supply and demand for data centers and power
regionally. So they mentioned that important
word there that they're still constrained.
They have so much demand, but they're trying to balance this
intelligently. One of the many bright spots of
the Microsoft report was the Copilot, which Mark Benioff of
Salesforce has referred to as Clippy 2 point O.
But it turns out that a lot of people want Clippy.
There's a lot of customers that Microsoft is selling Microsoft
Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption
is broadening with hundreds of thousands of customers.
Deal sizes are growing. The new updates enhancing AI
driven workload productivity. Copilot is enhanced with agent
based features for specialized roles like sales and customer
service. Copilot Studios let's
organizations build custom agents including for document
and workflow automation. Over 1,000,000 customer agents
were created this quarter, 130% increase quarter over quarter,
over double the amount of people using these agents in just one
quarter. That's of course from a small
base. This is a relatively new thing,
but it is rapidly growing. So Microsoft is another agenta
company. And one of the things that's
underrated by Microsoft, or at least a consideration in this
company, is the reason why their copilot will be more successful
than other companies. Random Co pilots is because
companies are already integrated with Microsoft.
They already trust the company with their data.
For example, if you're an accountant already using
Microsoft software, you're much more likely going to be
comfortable putting your financials into a copilot that
Microsoft offers than a random one like Open AI or Grok.
You're just not going to put in company financials to a third
party AI. Microsoft 365 Dynamics, which is
their ERP, continues to win deals.
It's actually moving a bit upstream.
There's more companies using this one.
Microsoft is a social media company with LinkedIn.
The membership surpassed 1 billion, growing double digits,
which increased engagement and video consumption.
That's an underrated part of this company.
They keep growing LinkedIn at a fast pace.
We have the gaming category. This is where they announced big
price increases. A lot of people are actually
shocked by the price increases they're announcing.
PC Game Pass revenue was up 45% year over year.
Cloud gaming set a new record over 150 million hours played.
AI is being integrated into gaming with Copilot for gaming
and real time gameplay generation by AI.
Minecraft movie is a major hit, boosting the game's engagement
by over 75%. You can go segment by segment of
this business and they are firing on all cylinders.
Microsoft is full steam ahead. Gross margins and operating
income had strong growth. Commercial bookings and
performance obligations both grew substantially, supported by
long term Azure commitments. Microsoft Cloud gross margins
decreased slightly due to AI infrastructure build out, but
overall company gross margins and operating margins remained
high. All core business segments,
productivity, business processes, intelligent cloud,
more personal computing exceeded expectations with strong growth
in Azure and related services. This last quarter was just
incredible. But then more importantly, the
commentary they had on the guidance also painted a better
picture. Remember that investors were
saying this quarter is going to be good, but the problem is next
quarter, that's when they're going to give really gloomy
expectations. Well, that wasn't the case here.
In their outlook, they said that Q4 guidance anticipates
continued stable demand across commercial consumer, LinkedIn,
gaming and search, basically every aspect of their business.
They're saying things are holding steady.
There's ongoing AI driven margin pressure due to all the money
they're putting into CapEx infrastructure.
But this is showing that they're building this because they
believe they have the demand. AI demand is growing faster than
capacity availability, leading to some expected AI capacity
constraints beyond June. Their overall outlook and
guidance was just as strong as the previous quarter.
Overall, top to bottom, it's tough to find anything to be
critical about this report. You can search with a fine
toothed comb to try to find something that's bad about it,
but there's just not much. If you refuse to have companies
like Microsoft in your portfolio, you're going to have
a very difficult challenge outperforming the index.
Now next we get to Apple. This is another massive company.
In fact, I still believe that Apple is the largest company in
the world. It bounces back and forth with
Microsoft, but it might have traded over the past week.
I think Microsoft may have actually beat them out.
Apple's down 3 1/2 percent on the day, but it's still up over
$200 per share, which is incredible because this company
is facing a lot of challenges, a lot more challenges than I
believe Microsoft's facing. If we go into the results, the
reason that Apple isn't cratering is because the company
still puts up enormous numbers, numbers of cash flow, that they
just dwarf other companies, even big companies.
Apple reported revenue of $95.4 billion, up 5% year over year.
Now that 95.4, that was the quarterly revenue, not the
trailing 12 months. So they're making nearly $100
billion per quarter. Diluted earnings per share was
$1.65, up 8% year over year. Service revenue was
disappointing. It set a new record at 26.6
billion. It was up 12% year over year,
but this was below investors expectations and the company's
gross margins declined a little bit.
If we look at this more clearly and just look at what's going on
with Apple, here's the issue I have with this company, my main
concern, they just grew revenue by 5%.
We have 4.91% right there. If we zoom in to the past 10
years, Apple grew revenue a lot in 2020 as people were infused
with cash by the government, lots of stimulus checks, people
wanted to upgrade their iPhones and spend that money, and Apple
soaked in a lot of that money like a sponge.
But since then, it wasn't just pull forward.
Apple's having a difficult time growing revenue outside of that
one time impact. Since around 2021, the companies
had revenue grow just slightly low single digits and now
they're eking out 5% revenue growth.
When you have 5% revenue growth in your company that's already
highly optimized for profits, there's not quite as much upside
as other companies. Really what this company can do
is grow it's services. They can try to grow services
every single quarter, every year.
Apple's trying to build up this service business and they're
facing a lot of resistance there as well.
But we also have the news of the tariffs and supply chain.
Although ALE doesn't give official commentary, the
analysts really tried to dig into any information they could
get. And overall, ALE was very
resistant to sharing anything really meaningful.
They kind of talked in circles when we look at some of the
things that they did mention that we can dig out of this.
We have Apple announcing $500 billion U.S. investment over 4
years, including expanding team of facilities in many States and
opening new advanced server manufacturing factory in Texas.
And they highlight that Vietnam is the primary source for most
iPad, Max Watch, Airpods products in the US.
So they're highlighting here that they're not totally reliant
on China. There's been the narrative that
everything they do, everything they build is in China.
And they're trying to defuse that narrative while rapidly
moving manufacturing elsewhere. The majority of Apple's global
sales outside of the US still have China as a country of
origin. Now, that's not as much of a
problem because that doesn't face the US tariff.
The estimated impacts from the tariff in the June quarter is
still substantial, $900 million in additional costs.
It's almost a billion dollars, which is just another tax they
have to pay. That's a billion dollars off the
table. And that's with some unique
mitigating factors flying planes of iPhones ahead of the tariffs.
So if the tariffs stay on for the quarter beyond that, then
they're not going to have these unique mitigating factors.
The burden of the tariffs will be above 900 million.
Apple right now is a combination of a lofty valuation, slower
growth and challenges with manufacturing and tariffs.
But on the plus side, it's still a company that does so much
buybacks, produces so much cash that even with all these
challenges, it's still weathering through.
It's still maintaining a lot of investor trust.
The next big tech company we get to 1 that's becoming
increasingly stronger and stronger every single quarter is
Meta. This is a company where I'm
routinely and repeatedly impressed by their earnings.
The strength of this company, They're now at 5% on the day
after having a great day after their earnings, after having a
great day after Google's earnings.
So Meta is having quite the streak here.
Look at this win streak from $484 up to 594.
It's still flat on the year, but Meta is on its way back up.
Check out some of the numbers here.
Meta's community continues to expand with over 3.4 billion
people using at least one app daily.
Daily. That's not a weekly user number.
That's not a monthly, you know, monthly active users.
No, Meta goes by days. Meta says you're going to be on
our app within a a 16 hour day. You're going to visit one of our
apps every single day. Half of you on planet Earth.
So half the people in this this globe that we're on are visiting
one of their properties every day.
This is no longer social media. In fact, I don't think Meta is
is any longer just a social media company.
This is like a, a framework. It's like an industrial
framework for global communication.
It's incredible the amount of engagement they have.
If we look at this, visualize that the numbers are just
staggering. And this is one of the things
that I really did not anticipate.
I thought right around here that it was simply tapering off and
slowing down. But they continue to push
growth. They're now doing it through
Reels, which is competing with with X or Twitter, and they're
now past 3.43 billion users daily.
Threads reach more than 350 monthly million active users and
is on track to become Meta's next major social app.
So this is another property. They didn't have to buy this one
or acquire it, and now it has hundreds of millions of users
addicted to it. Video consumption is driving
strong engagement with notable increases in time spent across
Facebook, Instagram, and Threads.
So people are now doing Instagram shorts, Facebook
videos on Threads. There's all sorts of videos on
it. They're getting into that
content as well. There's AI strategy.
Meta probably could more accurately be named AI, right?
They they went, Mark Zuckerberg at the time went with the name
Meta because he was really into the metaverse, but then he
pivoted hard towards AI. And really what this company is,
is it's an AI company. Meta outlined 5 primary AI
driven focus areas, improved advertising, more engaging
experiences, business messaging, Meta AI, the personal assistant
and AI devices. Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that
each area represents a long term investment downstream from
Meta's goal of building general intelligence.
And leading the AI model infrastructure.
So we have all these competitors in AI.
And right now Meta is taking a different approach.
They're really going the open source approach.
Now, open source, it has some caveats.
So Meta will say that we just wanted to be completely open.
We're trying to make it a level playing field, all of that.
But in reality, it's mostly open source.
Even though they create it, they'll still have ultimate
control. They'll have the leading models,
they'll have a lot of ways to benefit from this open source.
You can look at it in a similar way as Android being open
source, the company that benefits the most from that is
Google or Chrome being open source.
The company that benefits the most from that, again is Google.
Met is wanting to do the same thing for AI.
They mentioned on the call that advertising and monetization are
both being enhanced dramatically by AIAI, significantly enhances
ad targeting, creative generation, and campaign
optimization. A growing amount of advertisers
are using AI tools. New ad recommendation models
such as GEM are delivering efficiency gains.
The ad platform is evolving, evolving with solutions like
Advantage plus incremental attribution, boosting conversion
rates for advertisers. And Meta has a lot of properties
so far that don't have ads that they're just starting to
monetize, Threads being one of them.
By the end of this year, it's going to be a meaningful
contributor to their bottom line.
Now in terms of the capital expenditures, they're still
accelerating that. They know that there's going to
be some higher cost, some of that due to the tariff for
supply chain uncertainty, but the majority of the CapEx is
still directed at Meta score business needs.
So this is just to support the Meta business.
Meta is investing to ensure it can meet internal demands for AI
compute capacity, which remains A bottleneck to deploying new
products and features. Once again, we have the word
constraint or bottleneck when it comes to AI.
So you can look at these earnings and say that yes, Meta
beat on the revenue and the earnings per share by a large
degree. That understates what's going on
with these businesses. This isn't just an earnings
beat. These are companies that are
positioning themselves for the next 15 to 20 years of this AI
wave. We have the overall strategic
position of Meta. The company is positioning
itself for leadership in the next wave of AI social computing
by investing deeply in infrastructure, foundational AI
models, and new devices. This was another superb report
by this company. Even with the company trading at
a 24 PE ratio, with reports like this and the strength and
positioning, this stock is going to go higher.
That's $600.00 per share. It's going to go higher.
Now finally we get to Amazon. This was possibly the most
highly anticipated earnings of the week.
This company is right in the epicenter of the discussions
around trade policy and tariffs and Capec and AI.
This one has it all in a single company, and Amazon has
positioned as a company that really it's done a lot with the
fundamentals. I've highlighted how much Amazon
has grown over the past five years, but the stock price
doesn't really resemble it now when we look at the way that
it's behaved after earnings, it initially dipped 4% and now it's
in the green by 1%. That initial reaction to sell
the stock is starting to fade. If we look at what happened with
Amazon, the first thing to note is the company beat on the top
and bottom line by a huge margin.
So of course them beating the estimates is a good thing, but
there's a lot more important things going on with the
company. We take a look at the financial
performance. To start, Amazon reported in Q1
that revenue was $155.7 billion, up 10% year over year, that's
excluding foreign exchange. Now, I mentioned that in Amazon,
they typically give a range of guidance and around 80% of the
time they come in at the high end of that range.
And they did, once again, 10% revenue growth on a constant,
constant currency basis is very strong.
So this company still growing top line really strong, even
putting up numbers above $150 billion per quarter.
It's incredible what this company's doing.
Amazon's putting a ton of money into CapEx, pushing down their
free cash flow. If you take out that CapEx
investment, you have the operating income that's up 20%
year over year. So if you strip away some of the
major investments they're putting in now, you get a decent
idea of how much they're growing their underlying earnings power
in the fulfillment and logistics.
They notice that they're expanding into more rural areas.
They're transitioning into regional fulfillment networks,
stockpiling products closer to customers, resulting in record
delivery speeds and increased same day, next day deliveries.
Better inventory placement is a major ongoing priority to
improve in stock selection and reduce costs.
This is stuff that will be ongoing for a long period of
time as Amazon becomes more and more efficient over time.
With advertising, they saw strong growth, $13.9 billion in
revenue, up 19 percent year over year.
That was above investors expectations.
Advertising products span the funnel from brand awareness to
conversion, covering properties like Prime Video, Twitch, IMDb,
live sports and 3rd party sites. They're creating more tool sets
for advertisers, and advertising remains a major contributor to
profits across all major segments.
That's their way of saying it's very high margin, even though
they're not giving us the margins directly when we get to
AWS. This was initially one of the
disappointing parts of Amazon's report.
Microsoft reported their Azure number and it was way above
expectations. It was growing super fast.
And then Amazon came in just light of expectations, 17%
against 18% expected. Now, again, initially on the
report when investors just saw the numbers, they saw them miss.
But then Amazon came on the call.
Andy Jassi explained that part of this miss was simply capacity
constraints. They have a lot of server
capacity that was constrained, too much demand and that should
be relieved in the upcoming months.
They say significant demand for AI compute with capacity still
being consumed as fast as it's added.
They noted that over 85% of IT spend is still on premise.
Major cloud migration potential remains.
A lot of people are still focused only on AI.
But Andy Jassi was trying to say it is still a big thing.
Most of the world is still having IT on premise, so
although we're really big in AI, there's still a huge growth path
even without AI. AI is just like a bonus to their
growth path. The AI portion of AWS is now
growing year over year by triple digits.
In terms of the guidance and outlook, it was slightly weaker
than investors expected on the operating income or EBIT
outlook, but overall, the guidance was still strong.
They notice that there's broad caution that remains due to
uncertainty and macroeconomic factors.
When Andy Jassi spoke about the tariffs, he basically said that
he has no way of knowing how the tariffs will settle, but they
expect that tariffs will be around for some time in the
future and they're prepared for that.
It's not something that's going to destroy Amazon.
This company remains resilient during uncertain environments,
and they attributed that to their broad selection, pricing
and rapid delivery. They have many strategies in
place to minimize the impact of the higher cost supply chain
issues while maintaining customer trust.
And the company remains very confident in their current
positioning to capture the future growth in cloud, AI,
e-commerce, logistics, advertising and their new long
term ventures. They have a lot of initiatives
like Project Hyper and many others.
Amazon has made it very clear leadership is in investment mode
and neither you can get on board with that or you can leave.
It's your decision. The company has done this again
and again. When we look at Amazon's free
cash flow, it paints a clear picture.
We have time periods where the company's in profit mode where
they're not really doing as many huge investments.
That was back in 2018 to 2020. And then we had the pandemic.
They had a once in a lifetime opportunity to double the size
of their fulfillment network, literally AA fulfillment network
they've built over 10 years in only two to three years.
That's investment mode. They went into investment mode
in early 2020. They gave the green light to put
10s of billions of dollars in incremental CapEx, building out
their fulfillment center and then they started to go back
into profit mode. But what happened during this
time period when they're going into profit mode, AI happened.
LLMS, these new models, this incredible opportunity for
generative AI, for agentic technology, for all the
efficiencies. And Amazon is a cloud company,
one of the ones that can capture a lot of this demand.
They can build this into an entirely new incremental
business. So they went back into
investment mode. That is what they're doing right
now. The reason the free cash flow is
going down is the CapEx is going up.
When we bring up the expenses, you can basically see the exact
inverse of this relationship. We have the company dramatically
increasing their CapEx in 2020, building out their fulfilment
centers. Then they went back into profit
mode when they have those efficiencies from those new
investments. And then they have AI show up
and Andy Jassi once again gives the green light to not do
buybacks, to not do dividends, to not do the short term
decisions, but instead focus on building yet another massive
business for investors, another pillar of Amazon, which is
owning a significant portion of the new AI technology.
Now we have CapEx going back up. The numbers look rough in the
short term, but this is where investors have to make those
decisions. I'm not selling Amazon because I
believe the decisions they're making, the investments they're
making are highly attractive and I think they're wise decisions.
Right now, I believe this stock is worth around $260.00.
So I'm still very bullish on it. I'm excited about the future.
I'm not dissuaded at all about this report.
I thought it was great across the board and I'm going to
continue to hold. Now, let's go ahead and get to
some news. First of all, we have the news.
This is a little bit of economic news.
Employers added 177,000 jobs in April despite tariff
uncertainty. Hiring slowed slightly from
March's pace, while the unemployment rate held at 4.2%.
So we added 177 and the expectations from The Economist
was 133,000. This is just objectively good
news. A lot of people would have
assumed this will be much lower. In fact, I was one of them that
I thought we'd see a bit more of a slowdown, a lot of tariff
uncertainty. Maybe companies are pulling
back, but we don't see that. We saw good job numbers and the
unemployment rate, which is a trailing indicator.
But even for last month, it shows that it didn't go up at
all. We still have very low
unemployment in the US, So if these numbers are going to
change, they just haven't so far.
And this goes more to the point of the opening monologue of this
episode, which is to not buy into every negative narrative
that you've seen. I repeatedly said that even
though I don't like the tariffs, even though I don't think
they're great, I'm going to continue to buy any tariff dip I
see because overall economic news can change quickly.
The tariffs themselves are not set in stone.
They're decisions that are executive orders and positive
news can come out that breathe new life into the markets.
This week we've seen huge companies from the United States
still give optimistic outlooks and incredibly good earnings.
We've seen economic data show that hiring remains strong and
unemployment remains low. So far, the people that have
been doomsday and bearish have been proven wrong.
Now next we get to the headline which shows the continual
unraveling of the iPhone App Store monopoly.
This is yet another ruling against Apple.
Apple cleared a Spotify update to their app that under this new
rule allows purchases within the app.
Now not only does it allow purchases within the app, but it
allows those without paying Apple.
Up until now, if you have an iPhone and you have Spotify or
Netflix and you don't have Spotify or Netflix account, if
you go to sign up and you go to the premium versions, or if you
try to sign up for Netflix just through the Apple device, it'll
say you can't sign up here. And they can't even direct you
to the website from the app. Because if they do that, Apple
will also want to cut whether or not you pay with Apple Pay or
whether you just pay through the web.
If you sign up through the device of Apple, Apple wants a
cut and this ruling ruled against that.
Now companies like Spotify and Netflix can inform customers in
the app of how much their services cost and they can link
to the website to sign up there. And This is why Spotify is up so
much today. We have Spotify up 8% on the day
after this new app update cleared.
Now Apple's not happy about this at all.
Apple said on Wednesday it will comply with the court's order
but strongly disagrees with the decision and will appeal.
The judge, however, is even less happy with Apple than Apple is
about this ruling. The judge said that Apple has
wilfully tried to violate her ruling and held the company in
contempt. Additionally, the judge, Roberts
wrote that Apple's Vice president of finance, Alex
Roman, outright lied about when Apple had decided to charge a
20%, twenty, 7% fee on some purchases linked to its App
Store. Rogers referred the matter to
the US Attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal
contempt proceedings on both Roman and Apple.
So this is passed just judgments on app stores and policies over
transactions. Now we have the vice president,
the finance of Apple potentially becoming a criminal, lying in
court to the judge, intentionally deceiving them,
which is of course, against the law.
So this is going to be investigated and they'll decide
whether or not to pursue criminal charges.
This is escalated to a huge extent.
This brings in other concerns about Apple because if you have
leadership having to go to all these court cases and testify,
if they get things wrong or they intentionally deceive, if
they're mixed into this at all, they have huge scrutiny on them.
Executives don't want to be a part of this.
They don't want to have scrutiny on them, potentially falsely
testify or give any false information and be held in
contempt or face criminal charges.
This may cause some leadership of Apple to rethink their
positions in general. Overall, this is another huge
incremental loss for Apple, a big win for Spotify and Netflix.
These companies that have been restricted from sharing basic
information are finally more free.
Now finally we get to the real news here, the real important
topics of the day. Grand Theft Auto faces another
delay. Grand Theft Auto 6 is delayed
until May of 2026, which the means of this or that's going to
happen before Grand Theft Auto 6 is released are just becoming
more and more relevant. I mean, those are so accurate.
Now. When I looked at this news, I
thought, isn't it supposed to come out this year?
And it was right. It was supposed to come out.
Now it's delayed until mid 2026. The official statement from
Rockstar was that they're taking their extra time to deliver a
level of quality you expect and deserve.
That was it. Not much nuance or context
there, but when I was thinking about this, I was thinking that
Grand Theft Auto 6 may just be the most anticipated product of
all time. What beats it?
Can you think of anything that's more highly anticipated than
Grand Theft Auto 6? The trailer got record
viewership and record amount of time.
That trailer, by the way, for Grand Theft Auto 6 was in 2023.
So the trailer was years old and they're delaying it until
another year. This game is the most
anticipated game of all time, by far.
The last Grand Theft Auto was the most popular video game of
all time. It exceeded almost any media of
any type. It made more money than movies
make. Made more money than music
makes. It's one of the most profitable
pieces of media of all time, and this game is more anticipated
than Grand Theft Auto 5. Try to think of one thing more
highly anticipated than Grand Theft Auto 6.
I don't think you can. It's going to be quite the day
when this thing's released. That's going to be for this
episode. Enjoy your weekend.