I got a lot of earnings comments here but worth the read

There was a ton of earnings releases and calls to go thru. I did what I could to focus on the most relevant and the most interesting comments from them. There are a bunch but I think you'll find them helpful. At the end I go over some overseas data as the July PMI roll out begins today. 

From Alphabet:

Their results "showed tremendous ongoing momentum in Search and great progress in Cloud with our AI initiatives driving new growth. Search had another excellent quarter." Search growth in particular was driven by retail and financial services.

YouTube though missed expectations with 13% y/o/y ad revenue growth. 

Investors are also finally waking up to all that AI spend and realizing it is much more of an expense right now rather than a revenue generator. "Looking forward, we continue to expect to deliver full year 2024 Alphabet operating margin expansion relative to 2023. However, in the 3rd quarter, operating margins will reflect the impact of both the increases in depreciation and expenses associated with the higher levels of investment in our technical infrastructure as well as the increase in cost of revenues due to the pull forward of hardware launches into Q3."

Their cap ex in Q2 by the way was a whopping $13 billion and "Looking ahead, we continue to expect quarterly cap ex throughout the year to be roughly at or above the Q1 cap ex of $12 billion." There is a lot of profits needed to make around $50 billion per year of cap ex worthy of its spend. 

When is the spend going to show results? "Obviously, I think there is a time curve in terms of taking the underlying technology and translating it into meaningful solutions across the board, both on the consumer and the enterprise side." On the consumer side, "it's additive and enhances the overall experience and is positively contributing there." I'll say, is 'additive' worth all that spend? We'll see. On the enterprise side, "I think we are at a stage where definitely there are a lot of models. I thing roughly the models are all kind of converging towards a set of base capabilities." Solutions then come next but we'll have to see here too. 

To a question about the risks of overbuilding the AI capacities, "I think the one way I think about it is when you go through a curve like this, the risk of under-investing is dramatically greater than the risk of over-investing for us here. Even in scenarios where if it turns out that we are over-investing, clearly these are infrastructure which are widely useful for us...But I think not investing to be at the frontier, I think, definitely has a much more significant downsides."

Connecting the dots to the labor market, "Once again, headcount declined q/o/q, which reflects both actions we have taken in the first half of the year and a much slower pace of hiring. Looking ahead, we expect a slight increase in headcount in the 3rd quarter as we bring on new graduates."

From Elon Musk and Tesla:

"So to recap, we saw a large adoption acceleration of EVs and then a bit of a hangover as others struggled to make compelling EVs. So there have been quite a few competing electric vehicles that have entered the market. And mostly, they have not done well, but they have discounted their EVs very substantially, which has made it a bit more difficult for Tesla. We don't see this as a long-term issue, but really as fairly short term. And we still, obviously, firmly believe that EVs are best for customers and that the world is headed for a fully electrified transport, not just of cars, but also of aircraft and boats."

"The value of Tesla overwhelmingly is autonomy. These other things are noise relative to autonomy. So I recommend anyone who doesn't believe that Tesla will solve vehicle autonomy should not hold Tesla stock. They should sell their Tesla stock. If you believe Tesla will solve autonomy, you should buy Tesla stock. And all these other questions are in the noise."

From Comcast on their parks business which Disney (a stock we own) too is trading in sympathy with: