While we were all panicking about AI advancing to superhuman intelligence levels and becoming our evil overlords, it turns out the real problem is AI chatbots are too nice! OpenAI is rolling back a recent update that made responses from its GPT-4o model “overly supportive but disingenuous,” which goes against one of its 50 Laws of Robotics: don’t be sycophantic. I don’t know about you, but I prefer a little insincere flattery to AI models breaking most of the other 50 rules!
US stocks staged a Herculean comeback to finish positive yesterday. After starting the session battered by a double whammy of negative economic news and concerns about AI demand, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 were each down more than 2% at their lows. But stocks managed to hurdle those challenges over the course of the day and accelerated into the close, perhaps buoyed by month-end rebalancing activity.
When the dust settled, the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 ended in positive territory, while the Russell 2000 had a 0.6% decline. It’s the biggest intraday loss the benchmark US stock index has erased to finish positive since October 13, 2022. That’s the day the bull market began. |
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Meta and Microsoft each reported earnings yesterday, and both crushed it. It turns out that the businesses of selling advertisements and licensing software remain incredibly lucrative and powerfully profitable businesses. |
- Microsoft made $70.1 billion in revenue, with most of that coming from its two meat-and-potatoes businesses: the Azure cloud business ($26.8 billion) and its Microsoft 365, LinkedIn, and Dynamics segment ($29.9 billion).
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Meanwhile, all the way down the Pacific coast in Menlo Park, Meta delivered $42.3 billion in revenue in the first quarter and earnings per share of $6.43, well above the FactSet consensus estimate of $41.3 billion in revenue and EPS of $5.23.
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Back to Redmond, Washington, for a moment: while the cloud business had the biggest growth (up 21% year over year), the bucket of the business that includes Windows, Xbox, and Bing was still bringing in $13.4 billion.
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All in all, these were two extremely successful money machines continuing to do exactly what it says they do on the box — turning advertising and software subscriptions into big, chunky earnings per share. If that were the end of the story, it’d be a pretty boring evening, but it wasn’t and the reverberation was felt across tech all night.
So, what’s there to worry about? More on that after the jump… |
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Energy Investors, Here Comes The Sun |
Over the next three years, the IEA estimates that roughly 600 TWh of additional electricity will be generated from solar every year.1 To put that into perspective, Korea's entire population runs on about 600 TWh every year. Nations and corporations alike are attempting to find the balance between net-zero targets and expanding energy demands — with Big Tech companies already installing solar panels in their back gardens.
Investing in solar is a stake in tomorrow’s power. SolarBank investors are getting ahead of the shift.
As an established operator already powering 10,000+ homes (plus corporate energy transitions), an investment in SolarBank (Nasdaq: SUUN) could be your portfolio’s segue into renewable energy.
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