The Weekend Rip: Big Tech Time

This earnings season has already kicked off in true blockbuster fashion. It stands to get an upgrade. 👆👆👆

Over 859 companies will report earnings this week. Among them will be some biggies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Tesla, Google, and Microsoft. They’re all likely to knock it out of the park. That is, at least, if all the other earnings we’ve seen are any indication. 

The Big Tech mafia will be joined by some other “big reports” this week such as AMD, Pinterest, PayPal, Shopify, Mastercard, Visa, Pfizer, and Boeing. 💰💰

By weight in leading indexes, this week might be one of the most consequential. Many of the companies reporting take up meaningful portions of the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100. However, peak earnings season will have to wait ’til next week when over 1800 companies will report.

If earnings season was a roller coaster, we’d just now be reaching the top of that big, exciting drop. Hold on to your hats! 🎢🎢

Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev took the stage this weekend for the company’s IPO roadshow. 🏎️ Roadshows are like a sales pitch made to prospective investors, which explains the business and plans for expansion.

Tenev said that Robinhood has reserved “as much as 35% of its shares for traders” on its own app. It’s made possible through the company’s new IPO Access feature. With IPO Access, users can log onto the Robinhood app and reserve a set number of shares in certain IPOs. 🎰🎰🎰

The company also added that it hopes to offer retirement accounts such as IRAs and Roth IRAs in an effort to “make first-time investors into long-term investors.”  These accounts offer tax incentives to those who utilize them. 

They also touched on the controversy surrounding payment for order flow (PFOF), a practice by which firms such as Robinhood are paid for sending customer orders to third-party trading firms. The brokerage makes the majority of its income from PFOF. In 2020, Robinhood generated over $600M from the practice. The majority of it came from options trading.

The company’s CFO Jason Warnick said that“If a ban or other limitations on it were to be imposed, we believe Robinhood and the industry would adapt.”  🤔

The company will begin trading on Thursday. Follow the conversation at $HOOD.P this week.

You’ve probably heard some version of this joke before: three tech magnates hop onto a Zoom call to discuss Bitcoin, blockchain technology, and its implications. What happens to the price of Bitcoin? 

Jokes aside, apparently it goes up. In fact, their discussion about the strong bull case for crypto and Bitcoin pushes the price momentum so far north that it crosses back into bullish territory. 😲

By now, many of you know those three icons were Jack Dorsey (of Twitter & Square), Elon Musk (of Tesla & SpaceX), and Cathie Wood (of ARK Invest). And that Zoom conversation was The B Word, an online conference hosted by ARK Invest last Wednesday.

Before the event, Bitcoin had been in freefall. Several weeks ago, it fell below critical support levels. However, after The B Word, the crypto found its way above its 50-day moving average for the first time since May. 😎

If you find it hard to believe that an online conference could move prices so much? You probably missed months of Musk’s crypto memes moving markets. It’s hard to tell if this bullish energy will stand up, but if it fights through all the paper hands and bagholders first, it’s possible.

$BTC.X is up 8.47% this week.

Investors are throwing money at America’s stock markets. 💸💸💸

In the first half of 2021, global money managers put a record-breaking $900M into U.S. funds. It shows the demand for U.S. stocks, which were more popular than every other market combined. 📊

The $900M haul comes after investors tossed over a trillion dollars into international and emerging market funds last year, which dwarfed U.S. inflows by a sizable margin. Unfortunately for them, not all markets have done as well as the S&P 500.

U.S. stocks have rallied during the COVID-19 pandemic, giving many bulls something to cheer about. Strong earnings continue to push U.S. equities “up and to the right.” 

However, many analysts are anticipating that we’re fast-approaching peak growth for this economic cycle. And when things slow down, that means valuations will too.

But that doesn’t mean it’s ever a bad idea to bet on American stocks. 🇺🇸