Meanwhile, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100 are floundering like I do when someone mentions “tariffs” at a dinner party. -2.4% and -2.2%. Figma, on the other hand, is that obnoxious friend who wins the lottery during an economic apocalypse.
Earnings, that fickle friend, were the spark. AES outperformed forecasts, earning $0.51 per share where $0.40 was expected. But the harvest was not whole—the revenue fell short, a hollow sack in a time of need.
At the opening bell, the company’s shares plummeted as much as 13.2%, a freefall that seemed almost choreographed for maximum disorientation. Yet, like a bureaucratic form submitted too late and returned with cryptic annotations, it clawed back significant ground in subsequent trading hours. Was it the strength of its recent earnings report that stemmed the tide? Perhaps. But no such clarity exists here; instead, one must grapple with the unsettling weight of macroeconomic tremors—the latest U.S. jobs report, a document so dense with revisions and recalibrations that it might have been penned by a committee trapped in perpetual deliberation.
Behold, dear reader, the spectacle of a fiber broadband titan who, after reporting second-quarter earnings last night, found itself in a fiscal purgatory. The adjusted loss per share, though technically “beating” expectations, was less a triumph than a dirge, accompanied by the hollow cheer of cost-cutting measures. A company that must amuse its patrons with austerity is a company in dire straits, is it not?
Consider the arithmetic: a deviation of 0.1% from $1 is deemed negligible, as if the universe of finance were bound by divine precision. Two one-hundredths of a percent — a fraction so small it might as well be a footnote in the ledger of eternity. Yet what is this stability, if not the illusion of order conjured by men who have learned to dress chaos in the robes of arithmetic?
Hold your horses, because things aren’t as dreary as they might first appear! Apple’s performance was, in fact, rather remarkable for the quarter, showing a crisp $1.57 per share in earnings and a towering revenue of over $94 billion. A smashing victory for the tech giant, to say the least! Their revenue growth—up a full 10% compared to last year—is the highest they’ve seen since 2021, a truly splendid achievement! But here’s the curious bit—iPhone sales alone topped $44.5 billion, a figure that was almost double what analysts had been whispering in their tea cups (roughly $89.5 billion). Oh, and don’t forget those pesky $800 million in tariffs—they do love to sneak in like unwanted guests at the dinner table.
The truth is that Fluor’s actions have cast a shadow over Oklo’s prospects, and investors, ever alert to omens, are beginning to question whether they should follow suit.
It seems Fluor, despite being a veteran in the industry, just can’t catch a break. Their latest earnings report was, how should I say, not exactly a testament to corporate brilliance. A 6% drop in sales year-over-year and a nearly 50% cut in their adjusted profit. But here’s the kicker: Fluor is apparently sitting on a pile of NuScale shares, and now they’re looking to offload a significant chunk of them. The plan? Convert 15 million Class B shares into Class A shares and then sell them off into the market.
Carvana’s quarterly letter to shareholders reads like a fever dream: “April demand spiked after the auto tariff announcement… transitory benefit positively impacted Q2 Retail GPU by ~$100.” Transitory? Please. This is the Drug Enforcement Administration of economic policy, folks—tariffs as a hallucinogenic crutch to prop up margins in a market already teetering on the edge of sanity. The company sold 143,280 retail units, a number so absurd it makes the moon landing look like a local civic event. But ask yourself: when profits quintuple overnight, is it genius… or a collective delusion?
Imagine, if you will, that two decades ago, you had placed $3,000 within this particular tome. Today, your modest investment would have transformed into a veritable fortune of $2.3 million—a sum so vast it might tempt even the most stoic librarian to abandon their shelves for the chaos of Wall Street. And should you have chosen to reinvest dividends along the way, your wealth would swell further still, reaching nearly $2.5 million. An annualized return of 39.5%, contrasted against the S&P 500’s respectable yet pedestrian 9.22%, suggests not merely growth but something closer to alchemy.