Friday File: Q1 Earningspalooza | Stock Gumshoe

OK… so, everything is fine now?  Gee, that’s a relief!

We got a steady drumbeat of “all’s well” from Alphabet (GOOGL, GOOG) last week, then Microsoft (MSFT) and Meta (META) this week, reassuring us that corporate spending on technology is still growing nicely, and that heavy CapEx spending on more data centers and AI capacity is continuing as expected, despite the trade/tariff chaos coming from Washington… and that seemed to make investors feel a lot better about the “AI boom” story.  Particularly with ongoing indications that maybe President Trump and his team are coming close to at least some of the easier trade deals, and might engage with China in some productive way.

As has been the case all year, though, we don’t know what fresh drama next week will bring. There’s still lots of uncertainty about where the economy is going, and we did have a drop in GDP in the first quarter (the drop itself may not be meaningful, since a lot of it was caused largely by the pull-forward of import orders pre-tariffs… but even if we balance that out with the resulting inventory bloat, GDP was at best kind of flat in the quarter). And while consumers and businesses were clearly worried in April, according to the various survey results, and that’s likely to help spur a recession in the near future (every time businesses and consumers put a pause on their spending, that ripples through the economy), it’s also true that sentiment has been improving among investors this week, the uncertainty has not yet impacted unemployment, with the mid-April numbers that were released this morning looking a little better than expected… and we closed out April with the S&P 500 down less than 1% on the month. Which seems pretty nutty after those massive moves we saw a few weeks ago, and should remind us all that we can never know what the future holds.

I’m still happy to be pretty heavily hedged, to keep cash levels pretty high and mostly wait for potentially buying opportunities to come, and to keep nibbling as stocks with good long-term potential come into my “buy” range, if only to stay in a “buy” mindset that will help me avoid freezing up during times of future uncertainty. There’s been some action around the edges in the Real Money Portfolio this week, as is often the case, but …