Getty Images
Listen below or on the go on Apple Podcasts and Spotify
The president says ending quarterly reporting will save money. (0:15) Elon Musk buys $1B in Tesla stock. (1:27) Alphabet joins the $3 trillion club. (2:37)
This is an abridged transcript of the podcast:
Our top story so far, President Donald Trump said companies should not be forced to report earnings on a quarterly basis and should switch to posting numbers on a six-month basis.
“This will save money and allow managers to focus on properly running their companies,” Trump said.
The current SEC rules require companies to report results on a quarterly basis. But in the UK and EU, regulators require companies to file earnings twice a year, but they can choose to post quarterly statements.
“Did you ever hear the statement that ‘China has a 50- to 100-year view on the management of a company, whereas we run our companies on a quarterly basis???’ Not good!!!” Trump posted.
Mainland China-listed companies are required to report quarterly earnings, as well as semiannual and annual. Hong Kong-listed companies do not require quarterly reports, but they are required to post interim results.
While I can name a ton of financial journalists who would welcome earnings season just twice a year, longtime editor Herb Greenberg made the case for the status quo.
“Reporting quarterly is a good thing,” he said. “The issue is guidance, short OR long-term. THAT’S what creates the short-term volatility as the algo’s and everybody else play to THAT, and companies kowtow to the ‘meet or beat’ game.”
“So let me repeat: The issue isn’t quarterly reporting, but forward guidance, which would only get more extreme on a 6-month basis. And while they’re at it, if they really want to address short-termism, they oughta get rid of adjusted earnings, too,” he added.
Among active stocks, Tesla (TSLA) hit an eight-month high after CEO Elon Musk snapped up 2,568,732 shares of the company’s stock.
The shares were bought on September 12 in a price range of $371.38 to $396.54 per share. The total amount of the Tesla stock purchases was over $1 billion.
Wedbush is bullish on early iPhone 17 sales. Apple’s (APPL) latest model became available for preorder this week and analysts said there is strong consumer interest for the new smartphone line, despite some concerns related to the iPhone Air.
Analyst Dan Ives says: “We believe that iPhone 17 preorders will be up 5-10% vs. last year as we estimate that roughly 20% of the 1.5 billion users worldwide have not upgraded their phones over the past 4 years speaking to this massive upgrade opportunity on the horizon for Cupertino as (Tim) Cook & Co. looks to leverage the largest consumer installed base in the world.”
And Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said a framework for a deal to keep ByteDance’s (BDNCE) TikTok operating in the U.S. has been reached. President Trump also teased a deal ahead of a Sept. 17 deadline that would force ByteDance to sell its American assets.
Trump posted on that a deal was reached on a “certain” company that “young people in our Country very much wanted to save.”
And in other news of note, Alphabet (GOOG) (NGOOGL) became the fourth U.S. company to hit a $3 trillion market cap on Monday amid continued positive news flow. It joins Apple, Nvidia (NVDA) and Microsoft (MSFT) in the club.
Investors have had renewed enthusiasm in Alphabet since the company received favorable rulings in an antitrust lawsuit earlier this month.
Google’s cloud chief, Thomas Kurian, also recently said that Google Cloud had recently surpassed $106 billion in remaining performance obligations, amid continued demand for its services.
In addition, Gemini, Google’s generative AI chatbot, overtook OpenAI’s ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app on the App Store over the weekend.
And speaking of OpenAI, board chairman Bret Taylor recently echoed Sam Altman’s sentiments about being in an AI bubble. But like Altman, he didn’t sound too worried about it in a recent interview with The Verge.
“I think it is both true that AI will transform the economy, and I think it will, like the internet, create huge amounts of economic value in the future,” Taylor said. “I think we’re also in a bubble, and a lot of people will lose a lot of money. I think both are absolutely true at the same time, and there’s a lot of historical precedent for both of those things being true at the same time.”
“If you look at the internet bubble, a lot of people think about the flops, like Pets.com and Webvan,” Taylor added. “Through the lens of the past 30 years, though, we’ve now gotten most of the largest companies in the world, including Amazon and Google, two of the largest companies in the world.”