Wax off Wax On - Waffling - Mr. Miyagi President?

Government Cuts - Lots of Bye-Bye Notes.

Economics and the latest employment report.

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Warm-Up
- Wax off Wax On - Waffling - Mr. Miyagi President?
- Government Cuts - Lots of Bye-Bye Notes
- Economics are in.... People happy and not happy
- Musk - let's talk about this ....
- Praying for the turtles...

Markets
- Lots of Tumult  - confusion but still a retail bid
- Inflation numbers are not worrying (to some)
- Employment Report
- CPI Due this week
- Tariffs on Steel and Aluminum

The Karate Kid: Danielson - Wax On Wax off
- Trump 2.0: President Miyagi: tariffs on, tariffs off (used to be called waffling)
- Mexico and Canada Tarrifs are postponed for a month after "phone calls" from Trudeau and Sheinbaum
- China 10% tariffs and now China retaliates
--- Supposedly there is a call set up between Trump and XI in the next few days

Economics
- ADP: Private sector companies added more jobs than expected in January
-- Companies created a net 183,000 jobs on the month, slightly more than the 176,000 in December
---Pay for workers who stayed in their jobs grew at a 4.7% annual rate
- BLS Payrolls: 143k Added,  (shy of estimates)
---- URate 4%
----Avg Hourly Earnings kick up to 0.5% MoM
- - - UMICH for Feb -  67.8 (DOWN from 70.1
- ISM Serices 52.8, down slightly from prior month

Color on Confidence numbers
- Lots of concern over the potential for inflation in the UMich report
--- Biggest issue is the worry about the tariffs and how they may impact prices

Earnings:
- The S&amp;P 500 is reporting a 13.2% year-over-year earnings growth rate for Q4 2024, which is the highest growth rate reported in three years
- 77% of S&amp;P 500 companies have reported earnings above estimates, which is equal to the 5-year average but above the 10-year average
- The Financials, Communication Services, Information Technology, Consumer Discretionary, and Utilities sectors are reporting double-digit earnings growth
- Starting to seeing some issues in the BIG tech sector - that is why all of a sudden we are also seeing layoffs - expense cutting (although no cuts to cap ex at this point)

Earnings
- Amazon prelim Q4 $1.86 vs $1.49 FactSet Consensus; revs $187.79 mln vs $187.31 bln FactSet Consensus
- AWS segment sales rose 18.9% yr/yr to $28.79 bln
- Q4 operating income of $21.2 bln vs prior guidance of $16-20 bln; guides to Q1 operating income of $14-18 bln
- Amazon sees Q1 revs $151.0-155.5 bln vs $158.56 bln FactSet Consensus
----Amazon expects $100 billion of capex in 2025 on 'once-in-a-lifetime' AI opportunity

More Earnings
- Alphabet shares fell more than 9% in after-hours trading Tuesday after the company reported fourth-quarter results that missed on revenue expectations and announced more artificial intelligence investments.
- Earnings per share for the Google parent company beat analysts' estimates by two cents.
- Revenue: $96.47 billion vs. $96.56 billion expected by LSEG
- Earnings per share: $2.15 vs. $2.13 expected by LSEG

Even More Earnings
- Advanced Micro Devices reported fourth-quarter results on Tuesday that beat Wall Street expectations for sales and earnings, but the stock fell about 5% in extended trading as the company missed estimates in its key data center segment.
- Stock kept of falling in the days after too...
- Earnings per share: $1.09, adjusted, versus $1.08 expected
- Revenue: $7.66 billion versus $7.53 billion
--- Clearly this company was way ahead of itself and proposing that they had AI chips that were potentially competitive to NVDA - BUT NOT!

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DHUnplugged #740: President Miyagi