Earnings season arrived with expectations already running high. Nobody has a rational reason to be disappointed or even anxious. If anything, targets are moving even higher as key companies raise their outlook: operations are not just “resilient,” they’re flirting with all-time records and getting even

For much of the past decade, investors became accustomed to a Federal Reserve that did more than set interest rates. It managed expectations. Forward guidance became part of the market’s operating system, and every speech, projection, and press conference became another signal investors used to

One of Wall Street’s favorite habits is taking a complicated market and reducing it to a story simple enough to fit into a headline. A few years ago, that story became the Magnificent Seven. And to be clear, the name was earned. Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple,

The stock market is making an unusually large bet on artificial intelligence, but the debate has become too focused on the wrong question. Investors are not simply deciding whether AI is real. They are deciding whether the profits created by AI will arrive quickly enough,

The early winners in AI have been relatively easy to identify. They are the companies selling the scarce resources required to build the system: advanced semiconductors, networking equipment, cloud infrastructure, and specialized computing capacity. The next phase is more complicated because the bottleneck begins to

Second-quarter earnings season begins with investors looking for answers to two questions that will determine whether the current bull market can continue. Is artificial intelligence becoming a genuine economic force, and is the consumer economy strong enough to keep corporate profits moving higher? The setup