June 25, 2023

The Weekend Rip: June 25, 2023

It was a short week, with stocks pulling back and individual stock news taking the focus. 👀

Let’s recap and prep you for the week ahead. 📝

What Happened?

🔻 Stocks pulled back this week, with several Fed speakers towing the hawkish line.

🤩 This week’s Stocktwits Top 25 report showed outperformance relative to the indexes.

👀 Commodities caught traders’ attention this week. Natural gas showed relative strength vs. the rest of the energy complex, while precious metals melted lower.

🚚 FedEx reiterated concerns about global demand, with revenues down 10% YoY and the company focused on cost-cutting.

🏘️ U.S. housing starts jumped 21.7% MoM, their largest increase in about three decades. KB Home rose to all-time highs after delivering better-than-expected results and reiterating an upbeat outlook on new home demand.

📰 Other stories worth noting include AI startup fundraising, investors betting on the vet(s), Darden dipping from all-time highs, Accenture lagging the tech rebound, Siemens Energy plunging, and CarMax cruising higher on earnings.

🔥 Several names were on the Stocktwits trending tab for most of the week, including $GRNQ, $MULN, $SPCE, $SOFI, and $BTC.X.

Here are the closing prices:

S&P 500	4,348	-1.39%
Nasdaq	13,493	-1.44%
Russell 2000	1,822	-2.87%
Dow Jones	33,727	-1.67%

Bullets

Bullets From The Weekend

⚔️ Russian mercenaries return after challenging Putin’s authority. The heavily armed mercenaries withdrew from the southern Russian city of Rostov overnight after a deal halted their advance on Moscow. However, it left a lot of unanswered questions about President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power. Putin has not made public comments since the President of Belarus arranged a deal with Yevgeny Prigozhin for the Wagner Group fighters to end their armed insurgency in Russia. The world is anxiously standing by to see how this situation will develop. Reuters has more.

🔥 These companies invest in preventing disasters. As insurance companies pull out of California due to wildfire risk, others are attempting to solve the root cause of the issue. Convective Capital has identified roughly 300 startups working on wildfire-related technology to stem the destruction (and approximately 33,000 annual deaths globally) caused by wildfires and their related smoke. These crises have developed a category called “disaster investing,” where entrepreneurs bet big on trying to change the world and make a lot of money in the process. More from Axios.

💰 Amazon plans significant investments in India. Big tech’s investment in India has been happening for decades but has ramped up significantly after the pandemic revealed the issues with primarily relying on China’s supply chains. Amazon announced this week it has already invested $11 billion in India and plans to invest another $15 billion more by the end of the decade, with the vast majority of those funds going towards AWS expansion. While India has been a tough nut to crack business-wise, tech giants are not letting their recent failures deter them from investing in the world’s fifth-largest economy. TechCrunch has more.

The Brief

Need a concise summary of what’s going on this week? Look no further. Here’s an overview of important earnings and economic data for the trading week ahead.

Economic Calendar

It’s a busy week for data as the quarter comes to an end, with most investors watching Friday’s core price consumption expenditures (PCE) index. In addition to the above, check out this week’s complete list of economic releases.

Earnings This Week

Earnings season is essentially finished, with just 43 companies reporting this week. Some tickers you may recognize are $NKE, $MU, $PAYX, $BB, $MKC, $WBA, $STZ, and more.