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Nike stock rises as profit beats estimates and inventories fall

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Nike Inc. on Thursday reported a fiscal first-quarter profit that beat expectations, although revenue came up just shy of Wall Street’s estimates, amid a drop in sales for Converse sneakers.

Shares
NKE,
+0.23%
were up 1.4% after hours.

The athletic-gear giant reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $1.45 billion, or 94 cents a share, compared with $1.47 billion, or 93 cents a share, in the same quarter last year. Revenue crept higher to $12.94 billion, compared with $12.69 billion in the prior-year quarter.

Analysts polled by FactSet expected Nike to report earnings per share of 76 cents, on revenue of $13 billion.

Gross margin fell 10 basis points to 44.2%, weighed by higher product costs and a tougher foreign-exchange backdrop, and offset by “strategic pricing actions.” The company’s inventories fell 10%, as Wall Street seeks progress on efforts by businesses to narrow down their stockpiles of unsold goods.

Sales for Converse shoes were $588 million, down 9%, amid weaker demand in North America. Growth in Asia, however, acted as a counterweight to that decline.

Nike reported earnings as stiff competition — from the likes of Adidas
ADDYY,
-0.51%
and On Holding
ONON,
+0.27%
— and weaker demand for sneakers and clothing keeps prices lower. While analysts say Nike stands to benefit from an enduring shift toward more casual gear, recent outlooks from sporting-goods chains like Foot Locker Inc.
FL,
+0.65%
and Dick’s Sporting Goods Inc.
DKS,
+0.38%
have been more downbeat.

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September 28, 2023
How Colorado football coach Deion Sanders is making people around him rich

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The “Prime Effect” is real.

With his confidence and his aphorisms, to say nothing of his coaching skills, Deion Sanders has led the University of Colorado football program to a 3-0 record and a top 20 ranking.

Just weeks into his first season at the helm in Boulder, Sanders, known as “Prime Time” when he played in the NFL — and MLB — and now called “Coach Prime,” has already made his Buffaloes the most talked-about team in college football.

Colorado was 1-11 last season, good for last place in its conference.

Then, in December, Sanders was lured away from Jackson State, where he’d been head coach since 2020 and his teams had gone 27-6.

Last weekend’s game in Boulder, against in-state rival Colorado State, drew 9.3 million viewers, making it the most-watched late-night college football game ever on ESPN
DIS,
-1.55%.
It also attracted star power to Boulder, with rappers Lil Wayne and Offset, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, and NBA players Kyle Lowry and Kawhi Leonard on hand.

The success and the publicity are making many people in Sanders’s orbit wealthy.

Colorado’s top three NIL — or name, image and likeness — earners this season are coach Sanders’s sons Shedeur and Shilo, and Travis Hunter. All three players transferred to Colorado from Jackson State last season, an HBCU.

His top players have cashed in on newfound fame with NIL deals to the tune of millions of dollars.

Perhaps most notable among them is his son, junior quarterback Shedeur Sanders. The 21-year old made headlines after throwing for 510 yards and four touchdowns in Colorado’s season-opening shocker against No. 17–ranked Texas Christian. Since then, he’s thrown six more touchdown passes in two further victories.

The quarterback has more than 2 million followers on social media and has already inked several deals with big brands, including with yogurt producer Oikos
DANOY,
-0.84%,
Gatorade
PEP,
+0.21%
and Mercedes-Benz
MBG,
-0.15%

DAII,
-0.60%
— he has shown fans new Mercedes cars on social media more than once.

Through his stellar play, Shedeur attracted the attention of another noted quarterback, Tom Brady, who inked the dynamic collegian to an endorsement deal with his clothing company, Brandy Brand, last October.

“I think he needs to get his a— in the film room and spend as much time in there as possible,” Brady joked with the young quarterback during a recent recording of his podcast, “Let’s Go.”

Overall, Shedeur Sanders has an NIL value of approximately $5.1 million, according to On3’s proprietary NIL algorithm, up from $1.5 million at the beginning of the year — that’s the highest value in all of college football. On3’s algorithm considers NIL-deal data, performance, influence and exposure.

Fox Sports analyst Joel Klatt said on Wednesday that he believes Shedeur Sanders might be able to make $10 million in NIL deals, more than three times the average NFL player’s salary.

While Shedeur Sanders is the headliner at Colorado, he’s not alone in mining the NIL vein. Travis Hunter, a five-star sophomore prospect, has an On3 NIL valuation of $2.2 million, the fourth highest among all college football players. Hunter’s NIL value was $1.7 million at the beginning of the year.

Hunter plays wide receiver on offense and cornerback on defense, a rarity in a high-level college program. He has 1.8 million followers on social media, a successful YouTube
GOOG,
+0.23%

GOOGL,
+0.18%
channel, and endorsements with Celsius Energy Drink and 7-Eleven.

Hunter entered this season as the most highly touted NFL prospect at Colorado, and Deion Sanders contends rival schools have attempted to poach him via lucrative NIL deals.

“People offered Travis Hunter a bag — about $1.5 million to try to lure him and buy him out of the transfer portal,” coach Sanders told 247Sports over the summer. “But Travis is not the kind of guy that can be bought. He isn’t built like that. Travis is a relational young man that is built on relationships and stability. And that’s what he wanted and desired. That is why he decided to ride and stay with us.”

Hunter suffered a lacerated liver on a late hit by a Colorado State defensive back last weekend.

Don’t miss: Colorado coach Deion Sanders condemns fans’ death threats against Colorado State defensive back over late hit

Sanders’s other son on the team, Shilo, is also a top NIL earner. A senior defensive back who took an interception 80 yards and into the end zone during the Buffaloes’ win over Colorado State, Shilo’s NIL value, per On3, sits at $719,000. He has NIL deals with Porsche
DRPRY,
+0.10%

P911,
+0.26%,
Oikos and KFC
YUM,
+0.37%.
Shilo Sanders’s NIL value stood at $575,000 at the end of last year.

The NCAA started allowing college athletes to profit from their names, images and likenesses in 2021, ending a years-long crusade by student athletes. Football has been the college sport attracting the most NIL deals, followed by men’s basketball, women’s volleyball and women’s basketball, according to NIL platform Opendorse.

“NIL money, that’s a real part of college football now,” former University of Colorado and NFL football player Tyler Polumbus told CBS shortly after Sanders took the coaching job at Colorado. “I never thought that Colorado would be able to live in that world and compete in that world, but with Deion Sanders it becomes a whole new land of opportunity.”

From the archives (April 2022): Women are set to make more money than men on NIL deals in college basketball

Sanders, the coach, is getting paid, too, of course.

In addition to the $33.5 million he made while playing in the NFL (to say nothing of the nine big-league baseball seasons in which he was an active player), coach Sanders is on a five-year contract with the University of Colorado worth $29.5 million, as reported by the Mississippi Clarion Ledger, with various escalators tied to performance.

If Sanders continues to have success at Colorado, he’s likely to field even richer offers from bigger-time football schools. At Jackson State, his salary reportedly was just $300,000.

The wealth coming to Sanders and his top players, including his own offspring, is also accruing to the school and brands attached to “Coach Prime.”

The university has sold out all home games on the current schedule — a first in program history — and he’s selling tens of thousands of $67 “Prime 21” sunglasses, which won’t ship until December. He’s also helping sell merchandise at Colorado’s bookstore — it’s up 819% this fall vs. 2022 — and several varieties of Colorado-themed Prime gear are sold out at Nike’s
NKE,
-0.86%
online store.

Also on Sanders’s radar: trademarks. The six-time NFL All-Pro, two-time Super Bowl champion and Hall of Famer has filed for trademarks on “Coach Prime,” “Prime Effect,” “Daddy Buck” and “It’s Personal,” according to attorney Josh Gerben of Gerben Intellectual Property.

Colorado plays at the University of Oregon on Saturday afternoon. The Ducks are ranked No. 10, while Sanders’s Buffaloes, unranked in the preseason, have climbed to No. 19.

Oregon is a 21-point favorite, according to DraftKings oddsmakers, but 81% of all bets have been placed on Colorado.

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September 22, 2023
Arm prices IPO at high end of range, raising $4.87 billion

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Arm Holding Ltd. priced its initial public offering at the high end of its expected range late Wednesday following intense interest.

The British chip-design company priced shares at $51, raising $4.87 billion, following earlier reports that Arm would be pricing its IPO at $52 a share. A source close to the deal confirmed to MarketWatch that $52 had been the expected price, but that it was reduced to $51. That puts the chip designer at just over a $52 billion valuation. Recently, Arm had stated a targeted range of $47 to $51.

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September 13, 2023
Google spent billions to build an illegal monopoly, Justice Department says as trial gets under way

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Federal prosecutors opened a landmark antitrust trial against Alphabet Inc.’s Google on Tuesday with charges the search-engine giant for years intentionally snuffed competition through exclusive contracts with wireless carriers and phone makers.

Google
GOOGL,
-1.15%
GOOG,
-1.21%
spent billions of dollars on such contracts to cement its dominant position, a clear violation of U.S. antitrust law, prosecutors said.

“This case is about the future of the internet, and whether Google’s search engine will ever face meaningful competition,” Justice Department lawyer Kenneth Dintzer told the court. He said Google pays more than $10 billion a year to Apple Inc.
AAPL,
-1.71%
and other companies to ensure Google is the default or only search engine available on browsers and mobile devices used by millions of consumers.

Google’s search business accounted for more than half of the $283 billion in revenue Alphabet recorded in 2022. Search in large part has fueled the company’s $1.7 trillion market valuation.

Google attorney John Schmidtlein countered that companies and consumers use Google’s popular search engine “because it delivers value to them, not because they have to.”

The legal jousting in a Washington, D.C., federal court kicked off what is expected to be a contentious multiweek trial that could be one of the biggest domestic antitrust trials since the federal government tussled with Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
-1.83%
in the 1990s. Like that case, this one involves arguments over tying together multiple proprietary products.

To that end, Justice Department officials allege Google’s contracts ensure that Android devices come with Google apps and services, including Google search, preinstalled.

Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai heads a witness list of senior executives and former employees from Google, Apple, Microsoft and Samsung Electronics Co.
005930,
+1.28%.

“This feedback loop, this wheel has been turning for 12 years, and it always turns to Google’s advantage,” Dintzer said.

Conversely, Schmidtlein said Apple’s decision to make Google the default search engine in its Safari browser underscores that Google’s search engine is the product consumers prefer. “Apple repeatedly chose Google as the default because Apple believed it was the best experience for its users,” he said.

The Google case “could not be more different” from Microsoft litigation in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Schmidtlein asserted. “The evidence will show that Microsoft’s Bing search engine failed to win customers because Microsoft did not invest [and] did not innovate,” he said. “At every critical juncture, the evidence will show that they were beaten in the market.”

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September 12, 2023
Oracle stock sinks as revenue outlook falls below Wall Street consensus

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Oracle Corp. shares dropped in extended trading Monday after the software company’s revenue forecast for the current quarter fell short of Wall Street expectations.

Oracle
ORCL,
+0.31%
shares, which had been down about 5% after hours when its earnings call started, dropped more than 9% after Oracle Chief Executive Safra Catz forecast its outlook for the quarter.

On the conference call with analysts, Catz forecast second-quarter earnings of $1.30 to $1.34 a share on revenue growth of 5% to 7%, or $12.89 billion to $13.13 billion.

Analysts surveyed by FactSet had estimated earnings of $1.34 a share on revenue of $13.28 billion.

Catz added that if “currency exchange rates remain the same as they are now,” currency should have a 2% positive effect on total revenue and a 3 cent-a-share positive effect on earnings.

Oracle reported fiscal first-quarter net income of $2.42 billion, or 86 cents a share, compared with $1.55 billion, or 56 cents a share, a year ago.

Adjusted earnings, which exclude stock-based compensation expenses and other items, were $1.19 a share, compared with $1.03 a share in the year-ago period.

Revenue rose to $12.45 billion from $11.45 billion in the year-ago quarter.

Analysts surveyed by FactSet had forecast earnings of $1.15 a share on revenue of $12.57 billion.

Oracle reported cloud services and license support revenue of $9.55 billion, while analysts, on average, had forecast $9.43 billion; and cloud license and on-premise license revenue of $809 million, while the Street expected $967 million.

Hardware revenue came in at $714 million, while analysts expected $748 million; and services revenue was $1.38 billion, while the Street expected $1.43 billion.

Oracle shares finished up 0.3% during Monday’s regular session to close at $126.71.

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September 11, 2023
Tech’s wild week: How Apple, Google, AI, Arm’s mega IPO could set the agenda for years

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The second week of September, as in the NFL, marks a kickoff of sorts for the tech year.

Headlined by Apple Inc.’s
AAPL,
+0.72%
seminal iPhone event on the second Tuesday of the month at Apple Park, and anchored by Salesforce Inc.’s
CRM,
+0.33%
wildly popular Dreamforce conference up the road in San Francisco, these several days set a tempo as well as establish a road map for the industry over the next 12 months. They also open the floodgates on tech conference season, with shows stacked up over the next several weeks for Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
+3.33%,
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
+1.21%,
and Oracle Corp.
ORCL,
+0.32%.

Oh, and there’s that initial public offering from Arm Holdings Plc, the chip designer owned by SoftBank Group Corp.
9984,
+3.86%
that is expected to value Arm at $50 billion to $54.5 billion on a fully diluted basis. Another IPO candidate, delivery startup Instacart, also plans a public offering that would value it at $7.5 billion. Both deals could jump-start what has been a somnolent tech IPO market the past few years.

For that reason alone, this jam-packed tech week might hold even more import, and consequences, than previous years. A confluence of legal tussles, macroeconomic conditions, a trade war with China, and regulatory bluster have raised the stakes.

“It’s a tale of two cities with this week’s events highlighting both the issues and opportunities in tech,” Silicon Valley analyst Maribel Lopez said in an interview, assessing the week. “Arm’s IPO showcases the strength of tech and AI at a time when the AI forum and Google-DoJ shine a light on the concern that a few companies are wielding tremendous power for the future of the world.”

Consider: Hours before Apple is expected to unveil a new crop of iPhones more noteworthy for pricing than features, Alphabet Inc.’s
GOOGL,
+0.51%

GOOG,
+0.47%
Google faces off with the Justice Department in a federal court in Washington, D.C.

Justice Department officials argue that Google illegally leveraged agreements with phone makers such as Apple and Samsung Electronics Co.
005930,
+0.71%
and with internet browsers like Mozilla to be the default search engine for their customers, thus preventing smaller rivals from gaining access to that business.

“This is a backwards-looking case at a time of unprecedented innovation, including breakthroughs in AI, new apps and new services, all of which are creating more competition and more options for people than ever before,” Google General Counsel Kent Walker said in a statement.

The following day, Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., convenes an all-star panel of CEOs from Meta, Microsoft, Google, OpenAI and Palantir Technologies Inc.
PLTR,
+4.82%.

As lawmakers ruminate on how to harness AI responsibly, bipartisan legislation is in the works. Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., are among those crafting a bill.

Even Apple and Salesforce aren’t immune from recent events: Apple has endured a relatively rough patch of disappointing (for them) revenue and iPhone sales while balancing risk/reward with its huge investment in China, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has threatened to relocate Dreamforce to Las Vegas after more than two decades in his hometown of San Francisco if drug use and homelessness disrupt this year’s event.

The most pressing concern, when all is said and done, is AI — which hovers like the Death Star over the tech landscape.

“The biggest concern is the forum is behind closed doors, which could lead to regulatory capture, where dominant players in the industry help influence the regulations being imposed,” Kimberlee Josephson, associate professor of business administration at Lebanon Valley College (Pa.), said in an interview. “It’s almost as if it puts them in the hot while giving them a seat at the table at the same time.”

“At the very least, it sends the signal that something is being done,” she said. “Antitrust cases are so subjective. What constitutes barriers to entry? DoJ adds a level of seriousness.”

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September 11, 2023
Charter vs. Disney: Is this the end of the bundle as we know it?

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It was the night cable TV went out across most of America.

Late Thursday, all Disney channels, including ESPN and ABC, went dark on Charter Communications Inc.’s
CHTR,
-3.16%
Spectrum cable service as discussions over affiliate renewals hit an impasse — in the middle of the U.S. Open and college football season, and with the NFL regular season kicking off this Thursday night on NBC.

The carriage dispute between Charter and Walt Disney Co.
DIS,
-0.55%
threatens to upend business for both companies and dramatically reshape both the pay-TV and streaming ecosystems, and it could also spill over to affect content distributors and millions of consumers. The result will likely be far less spending on content from media and entertainment companies, including on sports and original programming.

If Charter exits the TV business altogether, millions of homes are likely to abandon the pay-TV bundle, potentially speeding its decline as other, smaller TV providers follow suit, analysts said.

“If Charter can drop ESPN, then any network (broadcast station or cable network) can be dropped,” analysts at LightShed Partners said in a note Tuesday. “Nobody is safe and the leverage will have permanently shifted to the distributor not because content is no longer king, but because too much content no longer requires the big video bundle and because the video bundle no longer is economically viable for distributors.”

Indeed, the pandemic-era boom that streaming services enjoyed is unlikely to return. Netflix Inc.
NFLX,
+2.00%
recently introduced an ad-supported tier while cracking down on password sharing. Disney also announced higher prices last month.

“The collateral damage could be wide-ranging from sports leagues with rights coming up for renewal, local TV station affiliates seeking material step-ups and creative talent tied to the programming investments made by linear networks,” MoffettNathanson analysts Michael Nathanson and Craig Moffett said in a report Friday.

Cable TV system needed a reset

Billions of dollars and hours of must-see-TV time are at stake. The conflict boils down to two issues: How much the carrier will pay per channel, and what percentage of a distributor’s footprint will be required to have the channel in their package.

The showdown was inevitable, with murmurings the cable TV model was fundamentally broken and with programmers like Disney continuing to pursue direct-to-consumer options. For example, Disney has indicated it plans to take ESPN, its most valuable property in the pay-TV bundle, direct to consumers in the coming years.

The conflict “marks the beginning of the end of the media-carriage bundle extortion on [multichannel video programming distributor services], and does not bode well for other networks that are perceived to have far less clout than Disney,” Raymond James analyst Frank G. Louthan IV said in a note on Friday.

Oppenheimer analysts went so far as to deem the dispute a “tipping point” for legacy TV and a defining moment for Charter, the country’s second-largest cable TV provider with 14.7 million subscribers. Media providers like Disney are transitioning to over-the-top (OTT) TV — streaming content via the internet — but are still expecting cable providers such as Charter to keep paying the same amount for legacy TV, the analysts said.

“The linear TV business model is broken. The only thing that can save it somewhat longer term is by combining and bundling with OTT services,” the Oppenheimer analysts said.

The impasse has Disney executives urging Charter subscribers to ditch the cable giant for Hulu with Live TV, which offers EPSN, ABC, Disney+ and other channels. Disney owns two-thirds of Hulu.

“Disney deeply values its relationship with its viewers and is hopeful Charter is ready to have more conversations that will restore access to its content to Spectrum customers as quickly as possible,” Disney executives wrote in a blog post late Monday. “However, if you are one of these frustrated customers, it can be infuriating to not be able to access the content you want. Luckily, consumers have more choices today than ever before to immediately access the programming they want without a cable subscription.”

Charter has remained firm that it is prepared to abandon its video business.

“We’re on the edge of a precipice. We’re either moving forward with a new collaborative video model, or we’re moving on,” Charter CEO Chris Winfrey said on a conference call with Wall Street analysts Friday morning. “This is not a typical carriage dispute. It’s significant for Charter, and we think it’s even more significant for programmers and the broader video ecosystem.”

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September 5, 2023
Labor Day is just a ‘milestone’ in the marathon to get workers back to the office

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The U.S. Labor Day holiday will mark another milestone in the marathon to bring workers back to the office, but it won’t be a quick fix for landlords, according to Thomas LaSalvia, head of commercial real estate economics at Moody’s Analytics.

Employers from Facebook parent Meta
META,
+0.27%
to Goldman Sachs
GS,
-0.26%
recently laid out mandates for staff to return to the office more frequently, starting this fall, including the big one — the federal government.

“A lot of companies are saying that after Labor Day, ‘We expect more out of you,” LaSalvia said, referring to days in the office. Still, office attendance, he argues, likely only stages a fuller comeback if a job or promotion is on the line.

Amazon.com Inc.’s
AMZN,
+2.18%
Chief Executive Andy Jassy has been trying to drive home the point by warning staff to return at least three days a week, or face the consequences.

That could prove difficult, with Friday’s U.S. jobs report for August expected to show U.S. unemployment at a scant 3.5%, near the lowest levels since the late 1960s, even if hiring has been slowing. The labor market, so far, appears unfazed by the Federal Reserve’s benchmark rate reaching a 22-year high.

It has been a different story for landlords facing a roughly 19% vacancy rate nationally and piles of debt coming due, especially for owners of older Class B and C office buildings with a bleak outlook or properties in cities with wobbling business centers.

See: San Francisco’s office market erases all gains since 2017 as prices sag nationally

As with shopping malls, LaSalvia said it’s largely a problem of oversupply, with many office properties at risk of becoming obsolete as tenants flock to better buildings and locations staging a rebirth. The trend can be traced in leasing data since 2021, with Class A properties in central business districts (blue line) showing a big advantage over less desirable buildings in the heart of cities (orange line).

Return to office isn’t going to save the entire office property market

Moody’s Analytics

“Little by little, we are finding the office isn’t dead,” LaSalvia said, but he also sees more promise in neighborhoods with a new purpose, those catering to hybrid work and communities that bring people together.

Another way to look at the trend is through rents. Manhattan’s Penn Station submarket, with its estimated $13 billion overhaul and neighboring Hudson Yards development, has seen asking rents jump 32% to $74.87 a square foot in the second quarter since the fourth quarter of 2019, according to Moody’s Analytics. That compares with a 2% bump in asking rents in downtown New York City to $61.39 a square foot for the same period.

The push for a return to the office also doesn’t mean a repeat of prepandemic ways. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that part-time remote work in the U.S. has stabilized around 20%-25%, in a late August report, but that’s still up from 2.6% before the 2020 lockdowns.

Furthermore, the persistence of remote work will likely add another 171 million square feet of vacant U.S. office space through 2029, a period that also will see tenants’ long-term leases expire and many companies opting for less space. The additional vacancies would roughly translate to 57% of Los Angeles roughly 300 million square feet of office space sitting empty.

“The fundamental reason why we had offices in the first place have not completely disintegrated,” LaSalvia said. “But for some of those Class B and C offices, the writing was on the wall before the pandemic.”

U.S. stocks were mixed Thursday, but headed for losses in a tough August for stocks, with the S&P 500 index
SPX
off about 1.5% for the month, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA
2.1% lower and the Nasdaq Composite
COMP
down 2% in August, according to FactSet.

Related: Some employers mandate etiquette classes as returning office workers walk barefoot, burp loudly and microwave fish

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August 31, 2023
Shopify Is Offering Amazon’s ‘Buy With Prime.’ 3 Benefits From the Deal.

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Shopify

unveiled a deal that permits merchants on its platform to offer shoppers the choice to buy items using

Amazon

Prime perks. Analysts anticipate a boost in merchant usage, among other benefits for the tech firms involved.

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August 31, 2023
Nvidia’s stock closes at record high, sending AI-chip maker to $1.2 trillion market cap

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Nvidia Corp. shares are back on track to try to turn in their best year ever after closing at a record high Tuesday, as the company reached a $1.2 trillion market capitalization for the first time.

Nvidia
NVDA,
+4.16%
shares rallied as much as 5% on Tuesday to an intraday high of $490.81, and closed up 4.2% at $487.84, while the S&P 500 index
SPX,
+1.45%
gained 1.5%. Last week, shares surpassed the $500 mark for the first time.

After an initial show of strength, Nvidia walked back gains following its blowout earnings report last week, when the graphics-processing-units maker topped Wall Street’s data-center sales estimates by more than $2 billion for the quarter, and forecast revenue for the current quarter of more than $3 billion above expectations.

Nvidia also closed above a $1.2 trillion market cap for the first time Tuesday, according to Dow Jones Market data.

In a little more than a year, Nvidia’s market capitalization had increased by close to $1 trillion, adding $925 billion in market cap since 2022’s stock price low, hit on Oct. 14, when shares closed below $113 for the first time since August 2020, according to Dow Jones data.

Last fall, Nvidia’s stock was melting down because it had to replace some $400 million in expected data-center sales to China with equipment that would clear a U.S. ban on AI tech as well as deal with inventory write-downs.

FactSet

Read from Sept. 2022: Nvidia’s ‘China Syndrome’: Is the stock melting down?

Nvidia shares are up 234% year to date, compared with a 17% gain by the S&P 500, and already ahead of their strong 2016 gain of 224%, and back in the running to overcome their best one-year gain of 308% set back in 2001, according to FactSet data.

Nvidia shares were also the second-most active on the S&P 500 on Tuesday, with more than 69 million shares exchanged, second only to Tesla Inc.’s
TSLA,
+7.69%
more than 132 million shares exchanged by the close.

For their part, Tesla shares posted a 7.8% gain Tuesday, their biggest one-day jump in five months, following a report that Tesla was launching a $300 million AI computing cluster using thousands of Nvidia GPUs.

Also on Tuesday, Nvidia and Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
+2.81%

GOOGL,
+2.72%
announced that the chip maker’s cutting-edge data-center chips are powering Google Cloud Platform and its PaxML large language model.

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August 29, 2023
XPeng Stock Surges on Plan to Buy DiDi’s Smart Vehicle Unit
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This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers visit http://www.djreprints.com.

https://www.barrons.com/articles/xpeng-hong-kong-stock-price-didi-evs-ca20a71d
Updated Aug. 28, 2023 9:00 am ET / Original Aug. 28, 2023 6:36 am ET

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A lot is going on inside

XPeng

these days. Investors have appeared to like it all.
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August 28, 2023
Nvidia’s stock soars after AI boom pushes chip giant to record earnings and blowout forecast

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Nvidia Corp. shares rallied in the extended session Wednesday after the maker of graphics processing units that is leading the AI-hardware charge reported a 141% surge in data-center sales and record results.

Nvidia
NVDA,
+3.17%
shares rallied 9% after hours, following a 3.2% rise in the regular session to close at $471.16, less than 1% below the stock’s record closing high of $474.94, set on July 18, according to FactSet data. A close at such levels on Thursday would mean a new record high for the stock.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company reported second-quarter net income of $6.19 billion, or $2.48 a share, compared with $656 million, or 26 cents a share, in the year-ago period. Adjusted earnings, which exclude stock-based compensation expenses and other items, were $2.70 a share, compared with 51 cents a share in the year-ago period.

Revenue surged to a record $13.51 billion from $6.7 billion in the year-ago quarter, driven by a 141% leap in data-center revenue to $10.32 billion.

Analysts surveyed by FactSet had forecast earnings of $2.08 a share on revenue of $11.19 billion, and data-center sales of $8.03 billion.

Nvidia forecast third-quarter revenue of $15.68 billion to $16.32 billion.

Analysts had estimated third-quarter earnings of $2.40 a share on revenue of $12.59 billion, with $9.15 billion of that from data-center sales. For the year, Wall Street, on average, expects earnings of $8.29 a share on $44.54 billion in revenue, a 71% increase from fiscal 2023’s $26.97 billion, with $32.41 billion of that in data-center sales.

“Companies worldwide are transitioning from general-purpose to accelerated computing and generative AI,” said Jensen Huang, founder and chief executive of Nvidia, in a statement. “Leading enterprise IT system and software providers announced partnerships to bring Nvidia AI to every industry. The race is on to adopt generative AI.”

Right after the report, Lopez Research analyst Maribel Lopez told MarketWatch that Nvidia’s “numbers prove just how much money there is in the AI hardware opportunity.”

“While cloud companies are selling AI services, Nvidia is walking away with a bulk of the revenue and profits,” Lopez said. “Nvidia’s minting cash with no apparent slowdown in sight.”

Nvidia shares are up more than 222% on a year-to-date basis, compared with a 42% surge in the PHLX Semiconductor Index
SOX,
a 15.5% rise by the S&P 500
SPX
and a 31% gain by the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite
COMP
over the same span.

Read: Will AI do to Nvidia what the dot-com boom did to Sun Microsystems? Analysts compare current hype to past ones.

Nvidia, which has stood as the largest publicly traded chip maker by market cap since February, having traded that title back and forth with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
TSM,
+2.15%
since late 2020, closed above the $1 trillion mark officially for the first time on June 14. Nvidia ended Wednesday with a valuation of $1.164 trillion, and one analyst thinks it could be the most valuable U.S. company in a few years.

Nvidia currently stands as the fifth-largest U.S. company by market cap behind Apple Inc.
AAPL,
+2.19%,
Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
+1.41%,
Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
+2.71%

GOOGL,
+2.55%
and Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
+0.95%.
While all have a big stake in the future of AI, the latter three companies are scrambling to outfit their cloud-service provider data centers with new AI gear amid tight supply.

While Nvidia is considered the overwhelming leader in the AI chip market, Advanced Micro Devices Inc.
AMD,
+3.57%
is considered a distant second. AMD’s data-center numbers declined in the company’s recent earnings report, although the company didn’t have comparable AI chip sales in its results.

Shares of AMD and TSMC were both up more than 3% after hours Wednesday.

See also: Nvidia ‘should have at least 90%’ of AI chip market with AMD on its heels

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August 23, 2023
Chip designer Arm files for long-awaited IPO, as smaller transistors send costs skyrocketing

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Arm Holdings Ltd. filed its long-awaited initial public offering late Monday, following last year’s failed bid by Nvidia Corp. to acquire the U.K.-based chip architecture company.

Arm has reportedly been seeking to raise $8 billion to $10 billion at a valuation of $60 billion to $70 billion, making its IPO the biggest of the year so far, and a number of large tech companies, including Amazon.com Inc.
AMZN,
+1.10%,
Intel Corp.
INTC,
+1.19%
and Nvidia
NVDA,
+8.47%,
are reportedly in the mix to be anchor investors.

In a late Monday filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Arm said it was offering to list its U.S. traded shares on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol “ARM.”

Arm, which is owned by Japan’s SoftBank Group Corp.
9984,
+1.16%,
was the target of an unsuccessful $40 billion acquisition by Nvidia last year. After Nvidia scrubbed the deal and paid a $1.36 billion breakup charge following the U.S. Federal Trade Commission’s unanimous decision to block it, Nvidia disclosed it paid Arm $750 million for a 20-year license to its technology.

At the time of the breakup, chips sales had hit record highs in 2021, surging 26.2% to a record $555.9 billion, fueled by pandemic-triggered shortages. But the chip industry has since swung to a glut.

Arm listed Barclays, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Mizuho, BofA Securities, Citigroup, and Deutsche Bank Securities among the IPO’s underwriters.

Recent reports said SoftBank was in discussions to purchase the 25% stake in Arm that it does not outright own, which is held by its Vision Fund 1, ahead of the IPO.

Read from Feb. 2022: Wall Street’s reaction to death of Nvidia-Arm deal: No duh

Arm reported net income of $524 million, or 51 cents a share, on revenue of $2.68 billion for fiscal 2023, which ended March 31, compared with net income of $549 million, or 54 cents a share, on revenue of $2.7 billion, in fiscal 2022, and $388 million, or 38 cents a share, on revenue of $2.03 billion in fiscal 2021.

Arm uses an architecture that is different from the once-standard x86 one built by Intel in the early days of computing.

The company said it has shipped more than 250 billion Arm-based chips since its started in 1990 as a joint venture between Acorn Computers, Apple
AAPL,
+0.77%
and VLSI Technology. In fiscal 2023, Arm said it shipped 30.6 billion chips.

The company said it is going public as the “resources required to develop leading-edge products are significant and continue to increase exponentially as manufacturing process nodes shrink.” Transistors are expressed in scales of nanometers, with design costs running about $249 million for a 7-nanometer chip and about $725 million for a 2-nm chip.

“As the world moves increasingly towards AI- and [machine language]-enabled computing, Arm will be central to this transition,” the company said in the filing. “Arm CPUs already run AI and ML workloads in billions of devices, including smartphones, cameras, digital TVs, cars and cloud data centers.”

Arm said it is working with Alphabet Inc.
GOOG,
+0.64%

GOOGL,
+0.71%,
GM’s
GM,
+0.45%
Cruise, Mercedes-Benz
MBG,
+0.78%,
Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
+2.35%,
and Nvidia “to deploy Arm technology to run AI workloads.”

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August 21, 2023
JD.com Earnings Beat. Stock Can’t Escape China Gloom.

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JD.com Posts Earnings Beat. But the Stock Can’t Shake the China Gloom.

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August 16, 2023
Alibaba Smashes Estimates. Here’s The Bad News.

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Alibaba Stock Jumps as Earnings Smash Estimates. But There’s a Case for Caution.

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August 10, 2023
Disney to Significantly Raise Prices of Disney+, Hulu Streaming Services

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Disney to Significantly Raise Prices of Disney+, Hulu Streaming Services

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August 9, 2023
Paramount’s stock roars higher after earnings beat and planned sale of Simon & Schuster

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Paramount Global shares were popping in Monday’s after-hours action after the media giant topped expectations with its latest quarterly financials.

The company posted a second-quarter net loss of $299 million, or 48 cents a share, whereas it posted net income of $419 million, or 62 cents a share, in the year-earlier period.

Paramount
PARA,
+2.94%
posted 10 cents in adjusted diluted earnings from continuing operations, compared with 64 cents a year before. Analysts tracked by FactSet were modeling breakeven performance on adjusted earnings.

“In [the second quarter], we maintained our focus on scaling our streaming platforms, maximizing our traditional business, and building a sustainable business model that will return the company to significant earnings growth in 2024,” Chief Executive Bob Bakish said in a shareholder presentation.

Don’t miss: Roku faces risk from Hollywood strikes — but Roku City might be able to help

Shares of the media giant were rallying 5% in Monday’s extended session.

Revenue slipped to $7.62 billion from $7.80 billion, while analysts were expecting $7.44 billion. Revenue for the Paramount+ streaming service was up 47%, while total direct-to-consumer advertising revenue grew by 21%.

“And despite the environment, TV Media continued to contribute significant earnings,” Bakish said. “As we look forward, we will continue to be guided by our content-first approach and seek to maximize its value across platforms and revenue streams, while also operating with the utmost efficiency through this year of peak streaming investment.”

Read: Streaming nirvana is about to become more expensive — and offer less content

The direct-to-consumer business lost $424 million in the second quarter on the basis of adjusted operating income before depreciation and amortization.

Separately, Paramount announced on Monday that KKR will purchase its Simon & Schuster publishing business for $1.62 billion in an all-cash deal.

“The proceeds will give Paramount additional financial flexibility and greater ability to create long-term value for shareholders, while also delevering our balance sheet,” Bakish said in a release.

Disney earnings preview: How much magic is left in the kingdom?

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August 7, 2023
Earnings have beaten Wall Street estimates by more than usual in 2nd quarter, but 3rd quarter isn’t looking great

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Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc.’s
AMZN,
+8.27%
second-quarter results and third-quarter forecast sales last week were a bet that more consumers would start buying more things, but Wall Street’s expectations for the third quarter overall have only grown dimmer.

With most of the 500 companies that make up the S&P 500 Index
SPX
already through the second-quarter earnings reporting season, slightly more than normal have reported per-share profit that beat Wall Street’s estimates, according to FactSet.

For the third quarter though, analysts now expect a mere 0.2% increase in per-share profit growth overall, according to a FactSet report on Friday, or slightly lower than the 0.4% growth that was expected for the third quarter on June 30,

And with some two months still left in the third quarter, and with that forecast likely to come down as the period progresses, Wall Street’s profit expectations are getting ever closer to turning negative.

Wall Street analysts overall still expect a bigger rebound for the fourth quarter, the FactSet report said. And they expect 2023 overall to eke out a per-share profit gain of 0.8%.

Worries of a U.S. recession emerging at some point during the back half of this year have started to fade at least a little after many economists fixated on the possibility earlier this year when the Federal Reserve was raising interest rates to combat a jump in inflation in 2022 . Some analysts now say savings fatigue could prompt more shoppers to splurge this year, after relentlessly tightening their budgets due to rising prices.

Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell last month said policymakers at the central bank had also shucked off their worries of a downturn.

See: Fed no longer foresees a U.S. recession — and other things we learned from Powell’s press conference

“The staff now has a noticeable slowdown in growth starting later this year in the forecast. But given the resilience of the economy recently, they are no longer forecasting a recession,” he said last month.

Not everyone is convinced that a downturn has vanished from the horizon though. Sheraz Mian, director of research at Zacks, told MarketWatch last month that more bearish analysts had kept pushing out their recession forecasts, after being defied by the actual, and more positive, economic data. Some economists continue to push out those forecasts.

“We still expect a recession, but now we are looking for it to begin in Q1 2024 rather than Q3 2023,” Thomas Simons, U.S. economist at Jefferies, said in a research note on Friday.

He said that interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve were only just starting to affect customer behavior. Households were trying to rebuild their savings, after spending through whatever they had built up during the pandemic. Student-loan payments were returning, he said, and corporate margins were thinning.

“Corporate profit margins are narrowing, and businesses will look to cut costs through layoffs,” he said.

This week in earnings

Among S&P 500 index companies, 34 report results during the week ahead, including one from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, according to FactSet.

Results from Walt Disney Co.
DIS,
+0.95%
will likely gobble up more media attention, but earnings from Paramount Global Inc
PARA,
+3.58%
— which oversees CBS, Showtime, Comedy Central and other channels — will offer more detail about how studios are positioning themselves with Hollywood actors on strike. Lions Gate Entertainment Corp.
LGF.A,
-2.44%
also reports.

Results from Tyson Foods Inc.
TSN,
+0.34%
will give investors and customers a brief look at the state of the grocery aisle where higher food prices over the past year have strained spending on other things. Beyond Meat Inc.
BYND,
-1.38%,
which also reports during the week, will be hoping new product launches of plant-based meat-like alternatives can overtake analyst skepticism, amid competition with fake meat and real meat alike.

Elsewhere, ride-hailing platform Lyft Inc.
LYFT,
-5.73%,
online dating service Bumble Inc.
BMBL,
-3.86%
and video-game maker Take-Two Interactive Software Inc.
TTWO,
-2.45%
also report during the week. And Canadian pot producer Canopy Growth Corp.
CGC,
-3.47%
will get another chance to pick up the pieces, after over-expanding and now trying to hold onto its cash.

The call to put on your calendar

Disney drama: One way or another, people on both coasts are mad at Disney
DIS,
+0.95%
Chief Executive Bob Iger right now, as his company prepares to report quarterly results on Wednesday. Shares of Disney are down slightly this year. The company is currently fighting with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is trying to stamp out Disney World’s self-governing privileges after the company criticized the state’s restrictions on classroom discussion of gender identity. When Iger accused striking actors and writers in Hollywood of not being “realistic,” the actors and writers shot back, noting his hefty executive compensation plan.

While the friction in Florida hasn’t hurt Disney’s parks attendance, the Hollywood shutdown has threatened Disney’s massive film and TV show operations, as Disney+ subscribers fall and investors more aggressively seek profits from studios’ streaming operations. Elsewhere, Rich Greenfield, an analyst at LightShed Partners, said “Pixar and Disney Animation have not had a breakout hit that impacted children’s play patterns and both Marvel and Lucasfilm feel increasingly tired from overuse.”

The sense is growing that more time is needed for Iger to fix Disney’s problems. On Wednesday, analysts may get a deeper sense of how much more, with the chance of more drama between Disney and its home state and the writers and actors the company depends on.

The number to watch

UPS and the Teamsters deal: United Parcel Service Inc. reports quarterly results on Tuesday, as rank-and-file Teamsters vote on a tentative labor agreement struck with the package deliverer in an effort to avert a strike. The deal, if approved, would raise worker pay and give the economy and businesses a breather, after threats of strikes or work stoppages at the nation’s ports and railways were averted over the past year.

Local Teamsters unions have voted overwhelmingly to at least endorse the agreement, between UPS
UPS,
-0.31%
and the Teamsters union, which represents 340,000 UPS workers, but not everyone was happy with the deal. Some part-timers felt the Teamsters could have used their leverage to wrest more from UPS, following a profit windfall at the company. And investors have held out for more detail from UPS executives themselves on what the deal might mean for the bottom line and for shipping prices.

Analysts will be dissecting the impact of the agreement as shipping demand lags, trucking company Yellow Corp.
YELL,
-0.83%
reportedly shuts down and FedEx Corp.
FDX,
-0.20%
tries to slash costs.

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August 6, 2023
The ‘narrow breadth’ chorus has fallen silent. What broadening participation in stock-market rally means for investors.

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A wider swath of stocks have joined the S&P 500
SPX,
+0.15%’s
upswing after the so-called Magnificent Seven — Apple
AAPL,
+0.32%,
Amazon
AMZN,
+1.11%,
Alphabet
GOOG,
+0.08%,
Microsoft
MSFT,
-0.72%,
Meta
META,
-2.11%,
Nvidia
NVDA,
-0.04%
and Tesla
TSLA,
+0.37%
— single-handedly propelled the large-cap index into a bull market in early June, with the gauge now up more than 28% from its low notched last October and rising to new highs since April 2022, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Hopes that the U.S. economy could pull off a soft landing and avoid a recession despite the Federal Reserve’s aggressive interest-rate hikes, as well as receding inflation pressures and expectations for the end of the Fed’s monetary tightening campaign, have underpinned a notable expansion in market breadth over the past two months, according Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist at LPL Financial.

The S&P 500 Equal Weighted Index
SP500EW,
+0.27%,
which lagged behind the market-cap-weighted S&P 500 index for most of the year, has now kicked back into gear and staged an impressive comeback in July. The equal-weighted index and the S&P 500 each advanced 3.1% this month, according to FactSet data.

The equal weighting eliminates the distortion of the megacap components and significantly changes several sector weightings in the S&P 500, including technology, which drops from around 29% on the SPX to only 13% on the equal-weighted index, said Turnquist in a Friday note. Meanwhile, the industrials sector has the biggest increase in weight, jumping from 9% on the SPX to 16% on the equal-weighted index.

Another way to quantify and compare market breadth is to look at the percentage of stocks on an index trading above their longer-term 200-day moving average (dma), Turnquist said. In general, if a stock is trading above its 200 dma, it is considered to be in an uptrend, and if the price is below the 200 dma, it is considered in a downtrend. Furthermore, a higher percentage of stocks above their 200 dma implies buying pressure is more widespread — suggesting the market’s advance is likely sustainable.

The chart below shows that 73% of stocks within the S&P 500 are trading above their 200 dma as of July 27, which compares to only 48% at the end of 2022. Moreover, the composition of breadth leadership has turned increasingly bullish. The highest sector readings include technology, industrials, energy, and consumer discretionary.

“So not only is breadth on the index robust, but cyclical stocks are also leading,” said Turnquist.

SOURCE: LPL RESEARCH, BLOOMBERG

Wall Street often views broadening participation in the stock-market rally as a measure of health and a constructive sign of the sustainability of the bull market.

Jimmy Lee, founder and chief executive officer of The Wealth Consulting Group said he is seeing “a lot of money” flowing into areas that are not the Magnificent Seven such as stocks in the industrials, financials, materials, energy and even real-estate sectors.

The S&P 500’s industrials sector
SP500.20,
+0.23%
climbed 2.9% in July, while the financials sector
SP500.40,
+0.44%
advanced over 4.7% this month. The S&P 500’s energy sector
SP500.10,
+2.00%,
which had been the biggest laggard when the rest of the markets exited the bear market in June, jumped 7.3% month to date after the U.S. oil benchmark
CL.1,
-0.20%

CL00,
-0.20%
closed above $80 a barrel for the first time since April.

Meanwhile, the tech-heavy S&P 500’s communication-services sector
SP500.50,
-0.03%
rose 6.7% in July, while the consumer-discretionary sector
SP500.25,
+0.56%
gained 2.4% and the information-technology sector
SP500.45,
+0.13%
was up 2.6%, according to FactSet data.

See: Stocks are on a seemingly unstoppable hot streak, but this bond-market ‘tipping point’ could see it end in a hurry

Stephen Hoedt, managing director of equity and fixed income research at Key Private Bank, told MarketWatch in an interview that he doesn’t see “any reason to get bearish here with the fundamentals that are underlying,” which gives investors reason to rotate toward the more cyclical areas such as energy, financials and industrials, while broadening the market away from just being concentrated in the megacap technology names.

“The growth has been a surprise this year for everyone, so that’s what the market got wrong coming into this year. When I look at growth, nominal GDP growth translates directly into earnings and we’ve seen earnings continue to surprise on the upside,” Hoedt said.

Hoedt pointed to the direction of the 12-month forward earnings estimate for the S&P 500 as an important indicator. “As long as the direction of the 12-month forward earnings number for the S&P 500 is going up, it’s really, really difficult to be bearish on the stock market,” he said. “It seems to me that we may start to see another inflection higher in forward earnings revisions that take into account this stronger growth environment that we’re in.”

However, the broadening of the stock-market rally and the bullish sentiment were also driving some on Wall Street to believe stocks are overbought and due for a correction.

Lee said there’s still too much pessimism out there and too much concern that some investors haven’t chased the market yet. “In the second half of this year, when the Fed does stop raising rates and if the economy stays out of recession, you can see major money — trillions of dollars moving from the money market into equities and other risk assets,” he told MarketWatch in a phone interview on Friday.

“When that happens, it’s probably going to push valuations even further. So I would imagine when that happens is when you can expect more of a correction to occur, but I think that we still have more room to go before that happens.”

U.S. stocks ended higher on Monday, finishing up July on a positive note. Three major stock indexes rallied this month, with the S&P 500 up 3.1% and booking its fifth monthly gain. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
+0.21%
gained 4.1% month to date, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
+0.28%
advanced 3.4%, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

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July 31, 2023
Amazon and Apple to headline Q2 earnings this week

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When Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. report quarterly results on Thursday, we’ll get a look at two big companies, with big expectations, trying to do smaller things — or at least less exciting things, or things that might be more inconveniencing to customers — to stay bigger.

For Apple
AAPL,
+1.35%,
D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte said, the focus will be on the iPhone, as always, as well as demand abroad and a new VR headset, as its stock hovers near record highs and its market value holds above $3 trillion. And he said that Amazon
AMZN,
+3.09%,
meanwhile, could face questions about the impact of cost cuts on e-commerce growth, and what AI could do to boost slower growth in its cloud business.

The results from those companies, which are big enough to make or break a single quarter’s worth for the S&P 500 Index
SPX,
+0.99%,
will follow those from the other tech giants like Microsoft Corp.
MSFT,
+2.31%
and Facebook parent Meta Platforms Inc.
META,
+4.42%.
And they’ll arrive as Wall Street starts to get a tad more realistic about AI: Microsoft shares fell after management said the expansion of its AI capabilities would be “gradual” — and gradually more expensive.

D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte, in a research note this month, said Amazon, like other big tech companies, was taking more steps to control its costs. That might help margins, he said. But he said he’d be watching for any impact to e-commerce sales growth, following thousands of layoffs and pulling back on its expansion of Amazon Fresh.

Amazon began tacking on servicing fees onto some Amazon Fresh delivery orders this year. And Forte noted what he said were other tweaks to service: Charging for a home pickup of a defective smoke alarm that used to be free, and incentives to wait longer during Prime Day.

“In our view, Amazon is playing a ‘game of chicken’ and banking on other e-commerce companies not to offer a superior service, instead of its historical approach of working backwards with a customer-obsessed approach,” D.A. Davidson analyst Tom Forte said in a research note.

He added later: “We believe there is something to be said about the experience of having an Amazon-branded delivery vehicle show up at your house EVERY day. Having one show up once a week or twice is not the same.”

At Apple, Forte said in a separate note, the iPhone, whose sales were still solid, had turned into more of a consumer staple than a discretionary buy. He also said he’d be looking for more detail about the upcoming iPhone 15 — likely to be modestly fancier than previous iPhones — the recovery in China and growth in India. Apple last month also unveiled its Vision Pro VR headset — for $3,499. Forte said he had his doubts.

“We believe Apple will have to overcome a number of structural challenges to achieve mass adoption for its AR/VR headset,” he said.

This week in earnings

Apple and Amazon will report as more companies than normal report quarterly profit ahead of estimates, according to a FactSet report on Friday. For the week ahead, 170 S&P 500 companies report results, with four from the Dow, the repot said.

Results from Uber Technologies Inc.
UBER,
+3.28%
and DoorDash Inc.
DASH,
+4.20%
will offer an update on the gig economy and how far app-based deliveries can go, while results from Kraft Heinz Inc.
KHC,
-0.11%
will offer an update on food prices and how much they might ease from the highs seen in recent months.

With the “Barbie” movie lifting rival Mattel Inc.
MAT,
-2.40%,
results from Hasbro Inc
HAS,
-0.29%
during the week will offer a glance at the rest of the toy industry, where demand hasn’t exactly been great, and what entertainment options Hasbro has up its sleeve to keep apace with its archrival. Drug maker Pfizer Inc.
PFE,
-0.36%
reports, as does video-game maker Electronic Arts Inc.
EA,
+0.25%.
Starbucks Corp.
SBUX,
+0.47%
reports as well.

The call to put on your calendar

“Barbie,” the Hollywood strike and Warner Bros. Discovery: Mattel has said it wants to turn “Barbie” into a content franchise. Now we’ll hear what Warner Bros. Discovery Inc.
WBD,
+4.07%,
the media conglomerate that produced the film, thinks about the film’s results and its prospects, as studios increasingly pump out sequels or offshoots of well-known, established character universes like “Star Wars,” Marvel and DC. The company — which reports oversees Warner Bros. CNN, TNT and the streaming service Max — reports quarterly results on Thursday. But even as “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” carry the parts of the entertainment industry that are still functioning through the Hollywood strike, Wall Street will likely be focused on contingency plans, and any sense of whether more viewers are turning to streaming with productions on pause.

The number to watch

Payments and crypto volumes: Results this week from trading app Robinhood Markets Inc.
HOOD,
+4.09%
and crypto exchange Coinbase Global Inc.
COIN,
+2.23%,
along with PayPal Holdings Inc.
PYPL,
+2.71%
and Block
SQ,
+3.42%,
will land at the intersection of rebounding markets and job-market concerns.

UBS analysts predicted solid growth and cost control for Block, and “steady” e-commerce trends for PayPal. But BofA analysts said PayPal’s search for a new chief executive, following the announcement of Dan Schulman’s retirement at the end of the year, would become more important, adding that “we think investors should rightfully expect the CEO search to conclude in the near-term.” While Bitcoin’s rebound helped Coinbase, the company and others in the industry face the prospect of tougher regulations. Robinhood and PayPal report on Wednesday. Coinbase and Block report on Thursday.

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July 30, 2023