Medicare Agent News: The Best Earnings Are Coming

Tuesday, November 29, 2022

The Best Earnings Are Coming

By Nicholas Jasinski | Wednesday, April 27

Halfhearted Bounce. Stocks staged a modest comeback today after yesterday's sharp losses. The S&P 500 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average both added about 0.2%. The Nasdaq Composite couldn't hold on to its gains, though, finishing flat, while the Russell 2000 slipped 0.3%. Each had been solidly in positive territory earlier in the day.

All four indexes had dropped more than 2% yesterday, as investors worried about shaky earnings reports, the Federal Reserve's upcoming interest-rate decision, and Covid-19 lockdowns in China—the laundry list of concerns goes on.

The S&P 500 bounced off a key technical level today, around 4,170 points, that has been a resistance level this year. That's where the index's March selloff bottomed out too.

Whether the S&P 500's next move is higher or lower will be revealing. Are we in a volatile but ultimately sideways period for the market? Or are we in an overall downtrend with lower highs and lower lows? That's how bear markets often begin.

The parade of first-quarter earnings reports continued today.

Spotify shares tumbled, as the music-streaming service increased its active user count by just 3% from the prior quarter, to 422 million. That includes 182 million paying subscribers, which were up just 2% even after adding back users lost when Spotify exited Russia during the quarter.

And the guidance was weak: for the second quarter, management expects monthly active users of 428 million, and paying subscribers of 187 million. Both were below Wall Street forecasts.

Read more on Spotify's results from Barron's Avi Salzman here.

Boeing stock also sold off today, after missing top and bottom line estimates for the first quarter. The aerospace company delivered 95 commercial airplanes in the period. That’s better than the 78 jets it delivered in the year-ago period, but far short of the 218 delivered back in the first quarter of 2018—before the pandemic and the grounding of its 737 MAX.

Back then, Boeing had quarterly earnings of about $2.5 billion on more than $23 billion in sales. In the first quarter reported on Wednesday, the company lost more than half a billion dollars on barely $15 billion in sales.

Shares are down by two thirds from their 2019 high. Al Root has more here.

After the closing bell, Meta Platforms beat a low bar for its first-quarter report. Earnings were better than forecast, despite weaker-than-expected revenues. The number of daily active users on Facebook returned to growth in the period, after a stunning decline in the prior quarter, which sent Meta stock tumbling 26%.

Management guidance for the coming quarter calls for revenue to be roughly flat with the year-ago period—and slightly less than the Wall Street consensus forecast.

Nonetheless, Meta shares surged about 15% in after-hours trading today, taking them back to where they were just last Thursday. They had gone into the report down by roughly 50% year to date.

Eric Savitz has all the details here.

Other earnings reports today came from Boston Scientific, Ford Motor, Harley-Davidson, Kraft Heinz, Pinterest, Qualcomm, ServiceNow, TE Connectivity, and T-Mobile.