As earnings season wraps up on Wall Street, it’s time to crown some of the biggest winners and losers of the last few weeks. 👑 If it was an awards ceremony, it would be called ✨The Earnies✨. Drumroll please… 🥁
Best Bounce Back Award: Just like Tom Cruise, Nvidia (NVDA) continues to leap from one blockbuster trend to another. 🛋️ From self-driving cars > crypto > gaming > the metaverse and, now, generative AI. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang called AI an ‘inflection point’ during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call and although revenue from gaming chips dropped 46%, the Nvidia share price jumped 14% after earnings were announced.
The Will Smith Award: Salesforce (CRM) announcing an upbeat forecast and a US$20 billion share buy-back was positive news for investors. However, it might feel like a slap in the face for the more than 7,000 employees laid off at the start of the year. 👋
The Gas Guzzler Award: Energy giant Exxon Mobil (XOM) not only took home about US$6.3m every hour in 2022, but the company earned so much profit on the back of rocketing oil prices that Reuters says they set an historic high for the Western oil industry. Congrats…we guess? 🤷
The Participation Award: Earnings season hasn’t been quite as gassed-up for young EV innovators. Shares in Lordstown Motors (RIDE), Lucid (LCID), Rivian (RIVN) and Nikola (NKLA) stumbled after underwhelming investors. Despite trying hard, the results reveal the challenges involved in getting a new EV company off the ground. Lucid said it produced just 7,000 vehicles in 2022, of the 20,000 they hoped to produce, while Rivian announced that risks and supply chain issues would hamper production in the year ahead. 🚗🚙🛻
Best Picture Award: In the battle for our eyeballs, it was Paramount Plus (PARA, PARAA) that really pulled in the subscribers. 🎬 While Netflix (NFLX) gained 7.7 million subscribers and Disney+ (DIS) lost 2.4 million subscribers, Paramount added almost 10 million, taking home our giant ‘plus’ sized trophy. 🏆
Finally, a round of applause for the S&P 500 Index, which after losing 18% in 2022 (including dividends), has dusted itself off to advance almost 6% so far in 2023. 👏
