qfx

This quarter, Meta didn’t just beat the Street’s guesses; it delivered an uncommonly large wallop, like a blue whale dropping onto a trampoline. Revenues bounded upward by 22%, touching $47.5 billion, while profits per share twirled higher by 38%. It’s almost as if the whole digital planet was tethered to Meta’s advertising balloon, bobbing and floating with giddy abandon—3.48 billion people peering daily into Meta’s dazzling labyrinth, and advertisers flinging their shiny coins at screens with both hands at once. Even their ads, drab as porridge, found themselves 11% more bountiful and 9% pricier than before.

By 2:45 p.m. ET, the shares had climbed 9.7%, a sputtering ember compared to their earlier 12.7% blaze. Such volatility, one might muse, mirrors the capriciousness of the sun itself—now a beacon, now a phantom.

Analysts, those modern-day oracles with Bloomberg terminals strapped to their wrists, had predicted $1.26 per share. FTAI delivered $1.57, as if the CFO had scribbled the numbers on a napkin at Applebee’s. Sales ballooned to $676.2 million, which sounds impressive until you realize that’s still less than Taylor Swift’s lifetime earnings from “Shake It Off.”

It was not an act of God, nor some sudden calamity from beyond the stars, but something far more human: missed expectations. Chemed reported second-quarter earnings that fell short of what analysts had hoped for, sending its share price tumbling like dry leaves in an autumn wind.

With earnings reports that outshone even the most gilded of accountants, Generac elevated its full-year guidance, transforming what might have been a pedestrian performance into a sonnet of fiscal artistry. The first half, it seems, was not merely profitable but a masterclass in prudent management—proof, if any were needed, that even the most mundane spreadsheets can be rendered poetic.

Wingstop, whose raison d’être is the systematic redistribution of chicken pieces accompanied by sauces of unknown galactic origin, disclosed that systemwide sales had expanded by 14% year over year. This is the sort of growth executives like to describe as “robust” (though the term is never explained—are sales doing push-ups now?). Meanwhile, reported revenue came in at $174.3 million, representing a 12% increase.

Adjusted earnings per diluted share ticked up, in a feat of small but noble arithmetic, from $0.93 to a symbolically satisfying $1. Wall Street analysts—who spend their days attempting to predict the unpredictable with greater and greater specificity, not unlike professional weather forecasters with worse umbrellas—were prepared to pat themselves on the back for an estimate of $0.87 per share. The actual figure, therefore, represents a triumph for the company and a minor existential crisis for those paid to divine such numbers.