Thursday afternoon this week produced key Q3:17 earnings results from Amazon, Alphabet, Intel, and Microsoft – and all reporting earnings beating expectations across the board. Google’s parent company Alphabet beat expectations on third-quarter results, with $27.77 billion in revenue, up 24% from a year ago. Intel beat analyst expectations in its third-quarter earnings report with revenue up 2% from the same quarter last year. Microsoft’s fiscal first-quarter earnings beat Wall Street expectations on both the top and bottom lines. And Amazon reported strong financial results in the third quarter that beat analyst expectations, sending shares soaring more than 10 percent on Friday, making Jeff Bezos the richest man in the world.
The tech rally took the Dow, Nasdaq and S&P to all time high despite poor results from retail stocks earlier in the week. Hasbro, Mattel, Sears and JC Penny, all posted disappointing results as their sales continued to decline with more and more consumers switching to Amazon. Retails stocks were not the only ones in trouble. Comcast posted a loss of 134,000 residential video subscribers and Apple continued to struggle with anemic demand for its iPhone 8 while waiting to see demand patterns for its iPhone X.
Future Wealth’s View
Besides the strong results from the tech companies that lends support to the bull market, we, at Future Wealth, are comforted by solid economic data that came out this week. The GDP grew 3.0 percent in the third quarter of 2017. This is a pretty good result, especially considering the revision of last quarter’s growth to 3.1 percent. That’s two quarters in a row of 3 percent growth.
With political tensions over North Korea easing off and natural disasters in Puerto Rico, Houston and California behind us, strong Q3:17 suggests to us that bull market still has legs. While recognizing that, at these high valuations, the market may be priced for perfection, we can only hope that the news flow is filled with more stories about Harvey Weinstein’s escapades and Russia’s meddling, both of which have no impact on the stock market but makes for good fodder for late night comedy shows.