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Here’s what you need to know today…
Big Picture
Bitcoin is making a comeback.
The US economy keeps chugging along.
America’s biggest companies are doing pretty well.
The Market: ⬆️ +0.7%
S&P 500: 4,247.68
1Mo: -2% | 1Yr: 10% | 5Yr: +60%
The market took a break from the negative trend today as investors celebrated a slew of positive updates from America's biggest companies.
It’s an excellent time to be a big corporation. Over the next few weeks, most of America’s biggest companies will give investors a peek into their financial health and performance. We’re about a quarter of the way through the reporting season, aka earnings season, and roughly 77% of S&P 500 companies have reported higher profits than investors expected.
The US economy is still growing. S&P Global’s composite Purchasing Managers Index (PMI), which tracks manufacturing and service sectors, rose to the highest level in three months in October. This growth comes despite expectations that interest rate hikes would lead to a recession and higher unemployment. Manufacturing snapped out of a downturn, and the services industry accelerated. European economies aren’t doing as well. Europe's composite PMI fell to a three-year low in October, signaling worry that the continent could face a recession.
Bitcoin is making a comeback. On Monday, its price reached over $35,000, more than doubling its price from the start of the year. Confidence in cryptocurrency is gaining after investment firms BlackRock and Grayscale made progress toward launching a Bitcoin-related Exchange Traded Fund (ETF). [🤓] ETFs are a big step for cryptocurrency to join mainstream finance and access a much larger investor base.
How are you feeling about the economy? |
Company Scoops 🗣️🌎💰
💡How are these companies doing? Judge their decisions. Investing starts with an opinion.
 Stellantis | Plant Shutdown Nearly 7,000 autoworkers walked out from one of Stellantis' most profitable truck factories on Monday, adding to the ongoing worker strikes seeking better wages. The strikes have lasted six weeks and affected nearly 50 sites nationwide. |
 General Motors | Uncertain Future General Motors reported another quarter of higher sales and over $3B in profits in three months while workers ramped up their strikes for better pay, taking another profitable factory offline. The stikes are costing GM $200M per week. |
 Alphabet | Back in Action Google's advertising business reaccelerated sales this past quarter as companies picked up marketing activity and YouTube reached nearly $8B in revenue. Google's Cloud business is growing quickly but not enough to catch Microsoft and Amazon. |
 Microsoft | Unstoppable Microsoft reported another quarter of surging profits, growing sales across every business from PCs to gaming, Office, search, and cloud and benefitting from new Artificial Intelligence features. Microsoft's cloud business keeps accelerating. |
 Spotify | Winning Formula Spotify posted its first quarterly profit since 2021 after raising subscription fees and cutting costs, including laying off 6% of its staff. The streaming giant's users kept surging, on track to reach its 1B subscribers goal by 2030. |
(These links only work for 24 hours while the story is live.)
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Inside Scoop 🤓
What is an Exchange Traded Fund (ETF)?
An ETF, or Exchange-Traded Fund, is a type of investment fund with shares that trade on stock exchanges, much like individual company shares. ETFs are often called index funds, designed to track the performance of a particular index of stocks, commodities, bonds, or other assets.
ETFs, like other types of investment funds, offer diversification. Buying a share in an ETF provides investors ownership across a portfolio of various assets, not just one individual company or commodity. Diversification helps investors limit the impact of individual poor-performing assets by spreading out the investment.
ETFs have a range of other benefits, from their reporting transparency to their efficient tax structure that gives investors more control over their profits. They also often have lower fee structures since many ETFs passively track indexes without paying expensive portfolio managers.
It’s important to know that ETFs are just an investment vehicle structure - a type of packaging for investments. The investments inside that packaging can vary widely, so make sure you know what you’re investing in before making a purchase.
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