Rippers Weekly Recap 2/10: AI and Layoffs

Plus Much More!

Hey everyone, it’s @StockMKTNewz Evan!

I spend 70 hours every week looking for news so you don't have to. I want you to see everything major from the week in under five minutes, but also be able to spend hours digging through all the stories and pictures. To that end, I include a lot of links (every picture has one). So, if you’re interested in a story or image, click in and explore!

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How The Stock Market Performed This Past Week

Heat Map of the S&P 500

How The Largest Stocks Performed

Best Performing Large Cap Stocks

Worst Performing Large Cap Stocks

🥚 Eggmageddon Is Over Folks

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Biggest Earnings from this week

Chipotle reported earnings Tuesday after the market closed, posting numbers of:

  • EPS of $8.02, missing expectations of $8.89

  • Revenue of $2.2B, missing expectations of $2.23B

Comparable restaurant sales increased 5.6% YoY.

Enphase reported earnings Tuesday after the market closed, posting numbers of:

  • EPS of $1.51, beating expectations of $1.26

  • Revenue of $724.7M, beating expectations of $703.2M

Uber reported earnings Wednesday before the market opened, posting numbers of:

  • EPS of $0.29, beating expectations of -$0.18

  • Revenue of $8.61B, beating expectations of $8.48B

Uber had monthly active platform users of 131M up 11% YoY and 2.1B trips completed up 19% YoY during Q4.

Disney reported earnings Wednesday after the market closed, posting numbers of:

  • EPS of $0.99, beating expectations of $0.75

  • Revenue of $23.5B, beating expectations of $23.4B

Disney+ reported subscribers of 161.8M below expectations of 164M.

Disney announced plans to lay off 7,000 employees. CEO Bob Iger also announced a new organizational structure with the goal of seeking more than $5B in cost savings.

Pepsi reported earnings Thursday before the market opened, posting numbers of:

  • EPS of $1.67, beating expectations of $1.65

  • Revenue of $28B, beating expectations of $26.8B

Pepsi declared a quarterly dividend of $1.265 per share up 10% from its previous quarterly dividend of $1.15 per share.

PayPal reported earnings Thursday after the market closed, posting numbers of:

  • EPS of $1.24, beating expectations of $1.20

  • Revenue of $7.38B, missing expectations of $7.4B

CEO Dan Schulman announced plans to retire from PayPal.

There were a lot of major earnings this week, I condensed it down to what I thought were the most popular ones. If you want to know anything about any of the other earnings feel free to send me a DM

A MESSAGE FROM MASTERWORKS

For 2023, investors have one New Year's resolution: Stop. Losing. Money. From “transitory” inflation, to millennial Bernie Madoff, 2022 was a wild ride in the markets. That is, except for one market.

The blue-chip art market. In fact, art auctions hauled in nearly $18 billion in 2022. The best year ever in a 277-year old market – all while financial markets tanked.

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Bullish Rippers readers can skip the waitlist to join here.

Major Headlines From This Week

Monday:

  • Google confirmed its working on a ChatGPT competitor named Bard - CNBC

  • Apple’s latest iPhones are selling at discounts of more than $100 in China - Bloomberg

  • There will be 0 ads for crypto companies during this year's Super Bowl - The Verge

  • Bed Bath & Beyond announced plans to sell a series a convertible preferred stock and warrants in order to avoid bankruptcy - Newswire

  • Boeing announced plans to lay off about 2,000 white-collar jobs in Finance and HR - the seattle times - Reuters

  • Janet Yellen says you don't have a recession when you have the lowest unemployment rate in 53 years - ABC

  • Dell announced plans to eliminate ~6,650 jobs or about 6% of its global workforce - Bloomberg

  • The NYSE plans to pay in full 60% of the claims submitted after its recent glitch - Reuters

  • Texas’ governor plans to ban TikTok from state government operated devices and networks - The Hill

  • Goldman Sachs cut its US recession odds to 25% from 35% - Bloomberg

  • The US FTC will not appeal the ruling in its case to try to stop Meta from buying VR content maker Within - Reuters

  • The parent companies of popular restaurant chains Panera Bread, Fogo De Chao and Cava Group are all aiming to go public through IPOs this year - WSJ

  • Ford CEO Jim Farley said “It takes us 25% more engineers to do the same work statements as our competitors” and that he “can’t afford to be 25% less efficient.” - Cars & Culture

  • Around 180,000 people in the US, or about 0.2% of monthly active users, were reportedly paying for subscriptions to Twitter including Twitter Blue as of mid-January - The Information

  • AMC is changing the way it prices its tickets now charging based on sight-lines and where you sit in the theater - Hollywood Reporter

  • China's Baidu plans to finish testing ChatGPT-style project called “Ernie Bot” in March - CNBC

  • FTX and its affiliated debtors sent confidential letters asking politicians, PACs to return donations made by the crypto exchange - Tech Crunch

  • Apple's largest supplier Foxconn reported January revenue of $21.96B, up 4.9% MoM - Reuters

  • The Rothschild family is planning to take its French bank private in a deal that values it at ~$4B - Bloomberg

Tuesday:

  • Microsoft hosted an event to show off its new Bing powered by AI and ChatGPT. One of the most pertinent things showed off was Bing taking a full 15 page quarterly earnings report and getting it down to just the key takeaway and then comparing it to other stocks - The Verge

  • Fed chairman Jerome Powell spoke at the Economic Club of Washington DC - CNBC Here are some quotes:

    • Probably need to do further interest-rate increases and hold rates at a restrictive level

    • The US is "just at the beginning" of the disinflation process

    • Expect 2023 to be a year of significant decline in inflation

    • It will take into next year to get back close to 2%

    • Powell makes around $190K per year and that he thinks its a fair salary for the job

  • Zoom announced plans to reduce its workforce by 15% or around 1,300 employees - Zoom

  • Facebook is asking many of its managers to transition to individual contributor jobs or leave the company as it tries to create a leaner organization - Bloomberg

  • eBay announced plans to lay off ~500 employees representing about 4% of its workforce - CNBC

  • Apple is currently beta testing its ‘Apple Pay Later’ with Apple Store employees - MacRumors

  • Elon Musk said he will unveil “master plan 3” at Tesla’s annual investor day - Twitter

  • Microsoft said that every 1% of market share in the search ad market is worth $2B in annual revenue - Yahoo

  • President Biden in his State of the Union address called for congress to pass his proposal for a Billionaire minimum tax and a surcharge on corporate stock buybacks - Forbes

  • Truist fired about 5% of its investment-banking division - Bloomberg

  • Mercedes-Benz announced today it's bringing its new, all-electric eSprinter van to North America this year - The Verge

  • Meta is planning to revamp its Horizon Worlds metaverse app, seeking to draw in more teen and young-adult users after working to improve the service’s design - WSJ

  • Bed Bath & Beyond announced the successful completion of its public equity offering - BBBY

Wednesday:

  • Google hosted an event to unveil its new AI search product Bard - Tech Radar

  • Alibaba said it’s developing its own ChatGPT like AI tool - CNBC

  • Microsoft’s Bing saw a 10x increase in new downloads globally following its recent AI news according to preliminary estimates from data(.)ai - Tech Crunch

  • Salesforce is creating a new AI tool called EinsteinGPT - Twitter

  • Dan Loeb’s Third Point has built a stake in Salesforce - WSJ

  • JPMorgan let go hundreds more mortgage employees - Bloomberg

  • JPMorgan plans to hire more than 500 new bankers catering to small businesses through 2024 - BusinessWire

  • UK antitrust regulators said Microsoft's acquisition of Activision Blizzard would hurt gamers - PBS

  • Affirm announced plans to fire ~500 employees representing about 19% of its workforce - CNBC

  • Google veteran of 18 years Clay Bavor is leaving the company to start his own AI-focused startup - CNBC

Thursday:

  • CPI for China in January came in at 2.1% (YoY), in line with expectations - Bloomberg

  • Micron announced its top executives will take a cut to their base salaries including a 20% cut to the CEO's base salary - Bloomberg

  • Microsoft disbanded a team formed in October to help customers use the metaverse in industrial settings and laid off its roughly 100 employees - Yahoo

  • Yahoo plans to lay off more than 20% of its workforce - Axios

  • Lucid Motors is offering its own $7,500 credit for purchases of select models of the Air sedan - Electrek

  • American Express and Microsoft announced an expansion to their partnership to develop reducing business travel friction for employees and businesses using Microsoft Cloud and AI - AXP

  • Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway filed for its sale of 4.234M more shares of BYD for $139M bringing its stake in the company down to 11.87% (from 12.26%) - AP

  • Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said this morning he had heard rumors the SEC wants to ‘get rid of’ crypto staking by retail investors - Bloomberg

  • Exxon announced the creation of a new global energy trading unit - FT

  • Activist investor Nelson Peltz said his proxy fight against Disney is now over after Iger unveiled his restructuring plans - CNBC

  • Gitlab announced plans to reduce its workforce by 7% or about 130 workers - CNBC

Friday:

  • The SEC is investigating the Mormon Church’s past efforts to keep its giant investment portfolio a secret (a practice which ended after a former employee revealed that the church had amassed $100B of holdings) - WSJ

  • Microsoft is getting ready to show how ChatGPT and AI will expand to its core productivity apps like Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook in the coming weeks - The Verge

  • Bed Bath & Beyond is closing all its locations in Canada - WSJ

  • The US CPI print for December was revised higher to +0.1% MoM up from -0.1% MoM originally - SeekingAlpha

  • Ford sold the majority of its position in Rivian last year currently owning 10.5M shares worth (about 1.15%) after previously owning more than 100M - Tech Crunch

  • Apple grew its workforce by 20% between 2020 and 2022, compared to a 100% increase at Facebook, Amazon, and Salesforce - Bloomberg

  • Ford is expected to announced a new $3.5B battery plant in Michigan with CATL as soon as Monday - Bloomberg

  • The NASDAQ 100 had its first red week of 2023 - SMN

  • The State Department will begin allowing employees working in the U.S. on H-1B or L-1 visas to renew their visas without leaving the country - WSJ

  • Google emailed recently laid-off employees saying it miscalculated the amount of stock they get as part of their severance. For some employees, this means they will be getting less stock than initially expected - Yahoo

  • The Biden administration is expected to release the final rules for its EV charging standards next week. This will likely force Tesla to open up its supercharger network or forgo federal funding - Reuters

  • The Biden administration is moving toward blocking the JetBlue & Spirit Airlines merger - Politico

  • Uber’s driver app is getting Apple CarPlay support - The Verge

  • Activist investor Valueact has taken a stake in Spotify, looking for it to cost cuts - Bloomberg

  • Alibaba sold its entire remaining stake in India's Paytm via a block deal - ET

Get Prepared For A Very Busy Week Ahead!

Economic Calendar

Earnings Calendar

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