Facebook Earnings & Tesla $4.2bln Deal With Hertz

Okay, very good morning. It's Tuesday the 26th of October. I hope you're doing well. And gonna kick things off and take a little bit of a look at the heat map here of the S&P 500. And the reason why is we hit another record high in US equities. Consumer discretionary, energy, and materials sectors leading the gains. Oil hit $85 for the first time since 2014, albeit prices have moderated a little bit, but still elevated in that context of a multi-year high. As you can see on the heat map, then you've got the energy sector generally a nice uniform green bright spot on the sector breakdown as we're looking at here. A couple of other standouts, of course, the brightest spot of them all down here at the bottom is Tesla. They finished this session up, of course, 12.7%. I'm sure you've heard the news by now, receiving an order of 100,000 cars from Hertz Global Holdings. The cars set to to be delivered in the next— over the course of the next 14 months. They represent in terms of value for Tesla $4.2 billion of revenue according to people fluent in the matter. So a monster deal there. Their shares exploded higher at the open, came back a little bit, but still finished up sharply. And I'm sure you read all of these headlines about Elon Musk's now worth, and he's now worth more than ExxonMobil as an individual than that entire company, things of that nature. But yeah, for now, even irrespective of before that deal, at one of the conferences that Musk spoke at just last week, he did actually say Tesla shares generally are a bit overvalued and they popped higher again. So yeah, Tesla continues. Otherwise going to talk about Facebook and then obviously we've got the likes of Microsoft and Alphabet reporting. This is their mega-cap tech week for earnings. So let's get straight into those and then we'll look at the broader macro picture and perspective because some other things we need to talk about as well. So first off, here's just a quick look at the phenomenal ride of which Tesla has been on over the course of the last few months and obviously the multiple challenges, let's call it, that are being confronted by Facebook from the Facebook leaks to the outage to everything in between. Essentially, at the moment, there's a lot of press coverage, as we've been talking about in our recent podcasts, focused and concentrated on Facebook, about the, the demographic challenge of which Facebook has. Essentially, a lot of younger users are falling away from the platform, more preferential for using things like Snap and TikTok and so on. But here's a look at Facebook's gradual decline, albeit still very elevated. And then Tesla's just almost meteoric rise we've had, going from around a $500 billion cap company, or in terms of share price value, up to $1 trillion, which we hit yesterday. A couple of things then. Let's first of all talk about Facebook and overall aftermarket yesterday. As you can see here in some of the aftermarket activity, they did move higher, came back a little bit, but overall finished up around $1.7 7% in aftermarket trade yesterday. So let's have a look at the numbers. Their revenues, $29 billion. That was actually slightly short of expectation of $29.45 billion. Their EPS, $3.22, was a beat on $3.17. Their daily active users— to see, these are some of the key metrics— they came in at 1.93 billion. That was actually slightly, ever so slightly better than expected, 1.92. Their monthly active users were at 2.91 against 2.92 billion expected. Um, they did announce a $50 billion boost to their share buyback authorization. For their Q4 2021 revenue view, this is an important metric, they see that at $31.5 to $34 billion, and that's against Street expectations of $34.84 billion. So their outlook as per the headline here, they've warned of fourth quarter headwinds after what's been very robust growth. And a lot of the rationale there, they're saying is the outlook reflects significant uncertainties in Q4 in the light of the Apple iOS changes, plus then macroeconomic factors as well. And those former, the iOS changes, of course, we saw very detrimental, of course, to the likes of Snap and all of the entire advertising industry. As Apple starts to gobble up and internalize and generate a new revenue stream from their own advertising. A couple of other things for Facebook. The company said, um, that they would start breaking out financial results for Facebook Reality Labs, which includes then the Oculus hardware division, next quarter. And this is quite a normal thing that these companies start to do, and we've seen this, the likes of Apple, over the years. That they kind of stop reporting definitive numbers on some of these key products. They start then reporting isolated different division performance in order to then kind of spread the load and the dependency on just one income stream. And so I guess what Facebook are trying to do is, as we've, we know, we've read about, it's been quite public that the challenges they're facing as a social media platform, whether through antitrust, through legislation, through the demographics, through lots of different things, including their advertising ability, because they too impacted heavily, of course, on the Apple iOS change, that they want to start talking up some of these new investment and potential growth areas. And obviously Facebook Reality Labs is one. There's been lots of talks about the kind of rebranding of Facebook as a group as they try to focus more on the metaverse, for example. So the move will enable Facebook to separate essentially its main digital advertising business from its major investments in virtual worlds so that investors then can have a little bit more clarity on how specifically those more growth sector areas might be performing, on the attempt then to try and just keep things up there. So that's the strategy overall. Then their shares actually moved up around 1.7% despite the slightly weaker revenue and the, the downbeat outlook that they had. All right, the other things then are— I just wanted to show this This just to make clear, because I know that the, the actual key here is quite small. So the green line is Alphabet shares and these are looking at year-to-date performance. So Alphabet is up close to 60% still from where we're at at the moment. The orange line down at the bottom here is Amazon. You've then got the other companies here. So I've got Apple here up around 11%. You've got Facebook up about 18% and obviously declining more recently, underperforming some of the others. And then you've got Microsoft. So if you were looking at the mega-cap tech stocks, in fact, it's been specifically Google or Alphabet that has outperformed, followed by Microsoft, then Facebook, and then kind of scaling down to Apple. And Amazon has actually been the worst performing of the bunch, which often is quite an eye-opener because That's the one probably that you use from a behavioural perspective the most. It's the one that's probably the most frequently mentioned and definitely was a huge pandemic winner while we were all in lockdown, stuck at home and everything and anything was being done via Amazon. Their shares are only actually up just over 1% on the year-to-date performance, whereas Alphabet have proven almost pandemic resistant in a way. Businesses looking to really take hold of this online spend, they've been generating more revenues and things like YouTube. They've brushed aside any kind of legislation like regulatory threats, antitrust lawsuits, things like that, and they've just powered on as well as have having pretty decent headway made in their cloud computing division as well, which is obviously trying to grab a bit of the market share away from the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. So yeah, just interesting. And certainly at the end of this week, obviously we'll have the full visibility on how these mega-cap tech stocks— who the winners and losers are so far. Facebook surviving, let's say, for the time being. We'll get Amazon and Apple aftermarket on Thursday, and I will be issuing a bit of a breakdown of what to expect as a preview for Alphabet and Microsoft, which are due aftermarket later on today. So all you need to do is just follow me on Twitter. I'll be posting those out later. Um, as I said, earnings are super busy today. Outside of those mega-cap tech pre-market, you've got 3M and GE, so some quite meaty companies in terms of index weighting. You've also got the likes of Eli Lilly, and then you've got the chipmaker AMD also due to report after market. You've got Visa, you've got Twitter as well, which I'm sure will see lots of volatility and also likely to grab a few headlines. You've got Robinhood also reporting as well. So some, some interesting names coming up over the course of the next few hours. All right, back to the top level, more macro perspective. One thing I wanted to have a look at was Asia trade, and there's kind of 3 things I want to mention. One is this, which is the fact that generally equities rose in Japan, fluctuated a little bit in mainland China and Hong Kong. Traders digesting generally some dialogue between the Chinese Vice Premier Li Yuhi and the US Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. Now, the description, which is what we always get rather than the line-by-line account of their conversation, was that it was pragmatic, candid, and constructive. That's about as good as you're going to get as far as these, these talks go. So overall, some quite positive talks there. So that Point 1. Point 2 is this: the, the PBOC, the Chinese central bank, injected 190 billion yuan— that equates to around $30 billion— into the financial system overnight via 7-day reverse repurchase agreements for a second straight day Tuesday. That was the biggest single-day addition since January. So in short, these are kind of much more— people often refer to this as like the plumbing of the industry, which is the kind of liquidity short-term necessity that's required, and injecting larger amounts increases liquidity. And typically then the central bank will be doing this in China to alleviate any potential tensions that might be emanating from, say, the property crisis that's happening at the moment. It does definitely lessen the likelihood of a RRR cut because this is another loose form of trying to attempt a similar type of thing. You know, the RRR would be the reserve requirement ratio lowered in order to free up more cash off the balance sheet in order to be more— have more liquidity in the system. The opposite way of doing this is the PBOC just intervening and injecting more. And as you can see here, then the overnight repo rate as an effect fell. And just think of the repo rate, the lower it is, the better the short-term lending environment, and therefore generally is a positive for markets in the short term. Now, the third thing, of course, to mention here was, was what's the rationale behind some of these latest moves? Well, one of the things here is another name you might start hearing, which is Modern Land. It's a different Chinese lender. It's not Evergrande. And the payment on the notes and interest of a bond worth $250 million was not met by a deadline that was initially set by Monday. Now, I've not read all the details, but obviously, as Evergrande is a reference point, These things typically have a 1-month, 30-day grace period, so I'm sure they're into that now. But the point is, is there's another one who's just not upfront met its payment schedule. And so, yeah, hence the reason why probably the PBOC felt necessary then to step in and start taking these preemptive actions. On the vaccine front, um, Moderna was one. They said that COVID-19 vaccine showed a strong immune response in younger children in a late-stage clinical trial. Paving the way for submission to regulators for clearance from the ages of 6 to under 12. Now, what's the— again, what's the rationale here for trying to target children of a relatively young age? Well, the idea from health officials is aiming to immunise younger children before the holiday season. So remember the typical COVID patterns that we've had through last year going into New Year. Was that people travel, right, to see their family. Uh, in the UK, we had quite a period of intense lockdown only for it to be temporarily loosened for a few days and allowing people then to intermix. But therein lies your problem, right? So if people are traveling from different locations and therefore all congregating when the weather outside typically is quite cold, and therefore you're in closer contact with one another for a longer period of time, which increases the transmissibility of the potential virus, particularly with young children, which is where the most recent uptick in cases is, is concentrated, which is in the younger demographic because of nurseries and schools and so on. So that's, that's the rationale. So we continue to keep an eye on that. As a timeline, the FDA panel is expected to review data on the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for 5 to 11-year-olds today. So we'll keep an eye out for any headlines on that. But just given the way the news has been coming out so far, I'd expect those to go through. I wouldn't be looking for any real meaningful market immediate reaction, but obviously this is quite a key element for what the implications could be for further COVID developments as we go into Q4, particularly Christmas and New Year period, and not forgetting Thanksgiving as well in the US, of course. On the political side of things, just very quickly, Senator Joe Manchin who's been a bit of a thorn in Biden's side, expressed optimism actually that Democrats could have a deal as soon as this week. So a little bit more positive headway on the surface level. However, House Democrats are far more skeptical. Specifically, the House Budget Chairman John Yarmuth said that there was numerous parts of the plan still being negotiated and talks could extend beyond this week. So I kind of classify this as a bit of a status quo. Manchin's come, come a little bit more in to start coming serious to the table to negotiate. But now there's other people impeding the progress at this, this point in time. The other thing is on the oil front, I mentioned a few OPEC comments yesterday. Obviously yesterday we kind of petered out at a high of $85.41, a multi-year high. We've come back a little bit. Trading pretty flat this morning at around 83.5. The Russian energy minister has come out and said that Russia wants to stick to the output pact at the November 4th meeting, that being that they'll— the current agreement is they'll increase oil production by 400,000 barrels per day. So it's this idea of very incremental increases and normalizing of production rates as the economy is, is gradually picking up. But as we were talking about yesterday, from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia, now Russia, that OPEC meeting November 4th, all things being equal, barring anything unexpected, is a non-event as far as any shock announcements, because the two major players now, Russia backing really and in line with Saudi, saying that they're not going to alter that agreement. Remember this time last month when they had the previous meeting, actually prices moved a little bit higher because people thought, well, they might be more aggressive to add supply given where the prices that didn't materialize. And the comments so far are looking like they'll just stick to the plan for the time being, which I would say is appropriate given what the global COVID situation looks like, particularly emanating out of China at the moment and other places as well globally at this present point in time. And finally, let's have a quick look at the calendar. Super quiet for the UK European morning as far as data is concerned. This afternoon, no real major 1:30 And then you've got US consumer confidence in the afternoon, which will come out alongside new home sales in the US at 3 PM. For consumer confidence, the headline figure is expected to show a slight improvement after the data dropped in September, which was really still reflecting a high degree of the spread of the Delta variant, which albeit is in a better place now, was still relatively high as far as North America in the US was concerned, which dampened some degree of optimism. Um, so looking for still a relatively matching figure, if you like, from, from last month. The API Crude Oil Inventories, um, after market. You've got quite a bit of fixed income supply for any bond traders— Italy, UK, Germany. And then you've got $60 billion in a 2-year note auction out of the States results just after 6 PM London time. And then, as I said, you've got those earnings, of which I'll be sharing, of course, on my Twitter account. Some previews for the big ones, your Alphabets, your Microsofts, and so on. All right, that is it. Hope you guys have a good day ahead. Um, if you've made it to the end and you're new to watching this video, thanks for joining me. Um, please do subscribe, like the video, just helps the algorithm get it out to as many people as possible in our mission to really just provide quality free information, of which I hope do you find this is. So, uh, yeah, have a good day, guys, and I'll catch you tomorrow. Thanks very much.