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Tesla headlines earnings this week (0:25). GM pops, Netflix slides (1:50). Intel’s strong results (5:50). Beyond Meat’s meme stock moment (7:00). CPI report, rate cuts (8:35). Interesting AI earnings coming next week (10:25).
Transcript
Rena Sherbill: Brian Stewart, our Director of news at Seeking Alpha, always great to talk to you on these Wall Street Roundups. Welcome back to another week.
Brian Stewart: Great to be here.
RS: We’ve got a government shutdown that still exists. We’ve got some tariff news with Canada. We’ve got major earnings. Where should we start this week?
BS: It’s funny. I kinda forgot about the government shutdown. It’s so pushed to the background.
I think this week has all been about earnings getting revved up. Tesla (TSLA) obviously, the headliner just in terms of the profile the company has, though the earnings themselves were neither here nor there.
The stock was up about 2% after earnings. It missed on its bottom line, and its margin shrank, but revenue was up 12% and beat expectations.
The company warned that it’s facing near term uncertainty with shifting trade, tariff and fiscal policy, though I think we all knew that.
So that wasn’t really new information, though slightly noteworthy that the company felt the need to to acknowledge that.
I think in general, people took the Tesla report as fine, a step on the way of the comeback that started after Musk returned to full time duties after the DOGE experiment.
So I think investors are basically in a wait and see mode. The stock has already recovered quite a bit from what it lost during the DOGE situation.
And so I think really they’re just looking to the future and and I think deliveries are gonna matter and production’s gonna matter as those reports come out in the coming months.
RS: And there’s many more companies to get into when it comes to earnings. What else would you put on that list?
BS: As long as we’re talking EVs, (GM) is an interesting one.
It popped 15% after its earnings. It beat expectations, raised guidance. The fundamental lesson from that was that the tariff impact was not as bad as the company expected. Meanwhile, GM has been increasing its market share.
It reached its highest market share since 2017. So the company’s executing well. There’s worries of an EV demand softening as people went out and bought EVs as the tax credit was expiring.
And so there’s there’s a worry, and this is something that could impact Tesla as well. There’s a worry that this sort of packed the channel in that regard. But overall, investors were very upbeat about GM’s report. And it just goes to show that the car industry is more than just Tesla.
And then on the downside, the big loser, at least among the headline stocks, was Netflix (NFLX).
It dropped 10% after its earnings. Revenue rose 17% from last year, beating expectations where the company took a 600,000,000 charge related to an ongoing dispute with Brazilian tax authorities. It also saw some margin decline.
I think that margin decline is probably more of a worry than the Brazilian tax situation which will resolve itself eventually. It’s kind of a near term hurdle, but not really an existential threat to the company.
I think investors are probably a little bit more worried about margins shrinking a little bit.
RS: We had Hardika Singh on from Fundstrat on Investing Experts this past week on Sunday. And she was talking about how there’s such an opportunity to be buying the dip these days as the stock market moves in, let’s say, unprecedented ways and things that are sometimes hard to understand, but the opportunities are there.
And as you mentioned Netflix, Cathie Wood, she added, she bought the dip on Netflix. Anything to say there or what you’re seeing from market participants or anything to note about Cathie’s position or any other large positions that are being taken there or anything else to note with Netflix?
BS: I think you’re getting at the fundamental debate that’s going on in the market right now. I think a lot of people are worried that the market as a whole and the AI stocks specifically are gonna turn into a pumpkin sometime soon.
It’s gonna strike midnight, and we’re all gonna find ourselves running without shoes on, if that metaphor stretches that far. I mean, Cathie Wood is a super bull, always has been.
So I don’t know, she’s looking long term, right? I mean, her idea is that these stocks are going to sort of change the fundamental way in which we do business and live our lives.
And so I don’t know how much she’s factoring in near term factors like tariffs and things like that. So I think that goes to the heart of the debate, to what your horizon is.
I mean, if you have a 10 horizon, certainly there’s opportunities to get stocks pretty cheaply. Now, if you have a much more near term, if you’re more of a trader, there are a lot of worries out there.
And so that’s the I think the question that’s being asked is when a stock like Netflix drops 10%, is that the start of a bubble bursting or is that the best opportunity you’re going to get for the next foreseeable future to buy that stock?
RS: And to the point of long term investing in that space, Dan Rayburn, an expert in the media and streaming space, he writes and speaks a lot outside of Seeking Alpha. We’ve had him on a few times on Investing Experts. And the last episode he was on, we called it Netflix is Still King. He espouses a bullish long term perspective on that.
We saw results from Intel (INTC) on Thursday. What would you say about that? Tech obviously top of mind for many investors as it has such a large effect on the rest of the market.
BS: Last check today, the company reported last night, stock is up about 2%.
It had strong results and guidance. People see this as signs that the turnaround at Intel is proceeding a pace. There are still worries about valuation and worries about execution.
The stock has rallied significantly recently. It’s up 57% since NVIDIA (NVDA) announced its investment in mid September. So it’s had a huge upswing over the past few weeks, a very short period of time.
And so now I think it’s a matter of investors in a show me kind of mood. So we’ll see in the coming quarters whether Intel can turn what seems to be a switch in momentum for the company into real bottom line results.
RS: Any other stock specific highlights that you would share with listeners?
BS: Just to straying off of earnings a little bit, I think it’s worth it as we talk about the debate around whether or not we’re in a bubble.
Beyond Meat (BYND) had a a meme stock moment this past week. So it jumped from 52¢ at the close of last Thursday to $3.62 on Tuesday. It hit $7.69 along the way.
There was some news to kind of sprinkle in there and drive the stock. It had an expanded deal with Walmart (WMT), but this was mostly a short squeeze meme stock situation, and there were sizable gains.
I mean, nothing in the the hundreds of percentage points that you saw from Beyond Meat, but Krispy Kreme (DNUT), GoPro (GPRO), iRobot (IRBT), also substantial. And these were all sort of the cluster of meme stocks that have emerged in 2025.
So I think if you’re skeptical about the market in general, I think situations like this raise a red flag when you see frothy situations like that.
If your argument is that we’re in a bubble, then these kind of situations pop up and it shows that there’s there’s kind of a a lack of rationality in the market.
I think a bull would just say we’ve had meme stocks going on through the twenty twenties. It’s just part of the market at this point. Every once in a while, this stuff is gonna bubble up, and you can’t really make longer term decisions based on how often this is happening.
RS: Hardika had another point in that episode about the meme stock ETF (MEME) that it just recently came back on board. So I think reflective of that point for sure.
I mentioned the government shutdown at the beginning. You said you weren’t very focused on it, but we have had a dearth of data as we’ve talked about because of that shutdown.
We did get the CPI report this week. Some bullishness if you wanna dive into that pool. What would you say about that report or economic data in general these days?
BS: That’s a good point about the economic data, especially we’re theoretically two weeks away from getting the next jobs report.
Pretty skeptical that’s gonna happen. I think there were headlines today that the next CPI report is in danger as well. So this might be the last CPI that we get for some period of time.
But pretty much in line with what people were expecting, the inflation rate, the core CPI was 3%, which is where we sort of settled.
Officially, the Fed is still targeting a 2% inflation rate, but I think there’s sort of an understanding that 3% is fine. You know, like, we wish we had 2%, but we’ll settle for 3%.
So the biggest thing in the economic calendar next week is the Fed decision. Everyone pretty much expects the Fed to cut rates by 25 basis points. That’s pretty much baked in 97% chance if you look at the trading so far.
Also, another rate cut is expected for December. It’s roughly fifty fifty if there’s gonna be a third rate cut in January. So people are expecting the Fed to take these stair steps lower in the next several meetings.
And so as long as inflation doesn’t spike anywhere beyond sort of that 3% range, I think that rate cutting situation is going to unfold as the market expects.
RS: We’ve got some major earnings coming next week to continue with the crux of earning season. What would you highlight for investors?
BS: I think an interesting dichotomy to look at is Google (GOOG) (GOOGL) and Meta (META), both AI plays, both coming out next week.
So its last earnings reports, it spiked 11% in the day after the earnings, but has since drifted off that level. So it’s down about 5% from that post earnings jump.
Basically, there’s a valuation worry at Meta. There’s also a spending concern. It’s sort of a habit at Meta to push a lot of chips in the middle when it sees an idea that happened with the metaverse and now it’s happening with AI.
And so the question is whether these bets are going to to pay off. I mean, the core business, the Facebook business, the social media business has been extremely strong.
And the question is, did the cash that it’s investing from these businesses into the new businesses, are those eventually going to fall to the bottom line?
And so that’s gonna be what people have their eye on in Meta. So there was like a a rush of enthusiasm after the last earnings report, which was extremely strong, and then a caution that set in afterwards.
Meanwhile, Google, after it released its last earnings report, which is also extremely strong, it largely received a shrug.
The stock didn’t move much at all after that earnings report. However, the stock has been making its way higher ever since. So it’s up about 36% since that last earnings report.
So the opposite reaction to Meta where there was sort of a indifference to the the actual earnings report, but then kind of a drift up as enthusiasm grew over the past several months.
So it’ll be interesting to see when Google’s report comes out, when Alphabet’s report comes out, whether or not the results can justify the enthusiasm that’s now been priced in.
RS: Anything else to add earnings wise or next week wise?
BS: We’ve got Apple (AAPL) coming out. The new iPhone came out, so there there might be some commentary on that.
Though I think probably the next quarter will be the key one for that. Another interesting thing about Apple is Apple is up only about 5% this year and only turned positive for the year in September.
It’s another stock that slipped a little after its last earnings report in July and it’s up about 30% since then. So like Alphabet, it’s sort of seen a growing enthusiasm over the past several months.
In Apple’s case, part of the upside that it has seen is that it made a $100,000,000,000 manufacturing commitment to the US, which was seen as a hedge against the tariff situation.
So Apple’s pretty exposed to the trade tensions between China and the US, So that $100,000,000,000 commitment is seen as a way to get an exemption if in fact those tariffs really bite down on the company.
It saw a boost in the August, September time frame as that worry, the tariff worry, seemed to get relieved.
And then Microsoft (MSFT) is also reporting next week, a company that also is an AI play. Look at the Azure numbers as that come out, the cloud numbers.
It saw 26% growth in its cloud business last quarter, which was up from 21% in the previous quarter and 20% the year before. So it stepped up to a higher growth plane with that last quarter. I think the question is whether it’s going to continue to see that higher growth rate or whether it’s gonna retreat back to where it was before.