Last week's big winners and losers reveal where the stock market is headed

CNBC

18 hours ago

You can learn an awful lot by looking at the list of stocks that made new highs last week — and the list of stocks that hit new lows. Foremost, they can tell you what is and isn't working in this market, especially during earnings season. We saw many groups roll over and only one, the data center, really advance. The combination of Friday's weak employment number , more discriminatory tariffs , and President Donald Trump's anger, brought out sellers after a very long run up. The selling is real and it will take an end to speculative excess and endless tariff news to get us to restart, and I don't see it happening. I hear the usual geniuses talk about how dip-buying is as stupid as ever, even as though it has been fabulous since 1982. I see a landscape that wants to go lower, but I also see earnings that don't justify big declines, just a drift until something great happens. And I don't mean Fed Chair Jerome Powell quitting. Let's start — and end — with some cracks in the Magnificent Seven. The growth in Microsoft's Azure cloud business and the breakout of Meta's multiple revenue streams explain the incredible gains of those two Club names — gains strong enough that they both made the list of new highs. The perceived weakness of Amazon's 17% gain in web services versus the whopping 39% gain in the smaller but all-powerful Azure certainly helped. Amazon put up $30.9 billion in revenues in its AWS cloud unit. That's obviously a ton of business, but it was flat with the previous quarter and only equal to the estimates. Microsoft's cloud acceleration in the quarter was jaw-dropping. The staggering distance between Azure's triumphant growth and Amazon's perceived slowing led to a rally in Microsoft's stock and a sell-off in Amazon shares — losses which triggered immense soul-searching. Was Microsoft real? Or was it inflated by its partnership with OpenAI and its ChatGPT function, which reigns supreme? The burgeoning ChatGPT roster was a big reason why OpenAI was able to raise $8.3 billion this week at a $300 billion valuation. That little-noticed fact should have turned more heads, and that alone could explain some of this week's craziness. After all, design software company Figma only raised $1.2 billion in its initial public offering Thursday, a puny deal, but it still managed to capture everyone's attention. (More on that later.) There was lots of grousing about Microsoft benefitting from the surge in OpenAI business. Some experts liken the partnership to that of Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, and predict it too will soon flame out, meaning that huge stream of Open AI revenue could go away. But the amount of fear instilled by AWS critics was behind the huge sell-off in Amazon . As I made my calls to sources Friday, I kept hearing that AWS, built to sell product, isn't built to help create new businesses based on AI. There is some truth here. AWS has fallen behind Microsoft in the cloud. I also believe that it doesn't have enough Nvidia product and has too much of its own chips, which are considered inferior by the fresh-faced AI developers even as it regarded as darned good for DevOps. Amazon is underspending its competitors. That's highly unusual and not good, and it's all that people cared about last week. I wish it didn't matter, but after this quarter Amazon's status as one of the greatest companies on Earth is now going to be considered suspect. The conference call was dispiriting, with CEO Andy Jassy giving a long and unnecessary soul-searching answer to Morgan Stanley analyst Brian Nowak's question about Amazon falling behind in generative. A do-over on that question would help, but there are none. All of the great data about retail meant nothing. Sure, we own Meta and Microsoft, but the stock of Amazon now worries me, even though I would never count these guys out in a gunfight. My work says it will all sort out itself and Amazon will reaccelerate, if not this quarter then this year and those who sell will regret it. Amazon will get the Nvidia's next generation "Rubin" chips, and swallow the damned pride of making its own chips. We just want Amazon to be the fastest and the best. How the company hasn't bought AI start-up Anthropic is downright perplexing, to use the word of the day. Oracle , of course, is a state of the art, Rent The Runway style data center that is now loved, and its build out has been nothing short of amazing. Yes, it rankles me because we owned it and lost it on account of two misses on its way to greatness. GE Vernova and Constellation Energy show up on the highs list because all of the hyperscalers admit to being power-constrained, with Amazon emphasizing the need more than the others. Constellation has nuclear, Vernova has the more practical natural gas turbines, along with nuclear. They can keep going higher, even as the bears consider them meme stocks. They are most decidedly not. Caterpillar reports next week and it will be considered part data center, part reshoring and part Biden infrastructure. All of those themes work until someone decides they don't work well enough. Eaton is a better analogue. DoorDash and Roblox make the list because there are always a couple of companies that amaze and can't be denied. Doordash caught some upgrades. Roblox has accelerating revenue. Both are awful shorts. (Reddit will have a similar trajectory when it eventually gets added to the S & P 500.) S & P Global is a pure play on offerings, something that we can all agree to are about to heat up based on Circle and Figma. And Altria ? Its basic business repels managers even as it enthralls users. I want to break down and buy Altria, which happens to be the greatest stock of all time. No kidding. Even better than Nvidia because: 1) it has been around for 100 years; and 2) the power of compounding. Then there's Figma, the spawn of CoreWeave and Circle. It looks like those who embrace meme stocks and those who love the tightly controlled bitcoin have fallen in love with the IPO process and the lack of float. Coreweave, an almost busted deal, cut the size of its initial public offering (IPO) to $1.5 billion: 37.5 million shares at $40 per share, down from its previous plan of 49 million shares at $47–55 per share. It worked and the stock exploded higher. Figma also had heavy demand and light supply, as only $1.2 billion went to the company and the rest went to selling shareholders. Strange ratio there: 12.4 million shares raised by the company and 24 million shares raised by selling shareholders. I can't blame the bankers for low-balling Circle after Coreweave. But there was no excuse for the underpricing of Figma; even the gents putting up the signs in front of the New York Stock Exchange knew it would be a smash. Anyway, it's too bad because it devolved into rank speculation as the buyers, sensing there could be no more new shares trading for six months, decided to play bitcoin and generate an increase on the second day of trading that was childish. Palantir reports results on Monday, and I am expecting another home run, which will ignite even more speculation. Friday's losers were far more varied and deep. First, can we dispense with the idea that the employment number, as weak as it was, caused the sell-off? The classic recession stocks fared miserably: Procter & Gamble , Bristol Myers , Colgate , McCormick all landed on the new-low list. (Bristol was good, but without a hit in Cobenfy, its drug to treat schizophrenia , we will never make money in it.) These stocks would be on the list of new highs if a recession was the real story. Plus, with bonds soaring and yields plunging, you would think someone would want that P & G yield. You also would have thought that Baxter would be on the new highs list in a recession, but all I can say is have no idea what's happening there. But it isn't good. If you cut your dividend (as in the case of Dow ) or if the dividend is doubted (think UPS ), you end up on the list of new lows. Both of those stocks deserve that fate. Old Dominion is a legit recession story if you want to frame it that way. Carmax , too, except the incredible move in Carvana makes that reasoning suspect. The food group is just so bad: General Mills and Conagra pop up; the latter lives on this low list. Then there are a couple of oddballs. Accenture had been on a multiyear consulting tear. That's over. It didn't take long for Otis after myriad good quarters to land on this ignoble list. Two yesteryear faves, Chipotle and Lululemon , are a reminder that this market has little enthusiasm for high-multiple disappointments. Both need huge upside surprises to change their direction. I don't see any coming. And then there's UnitedHealth , the much beloved UnitedHealth. What a death rattle feel for that Dow stock. It's a wide and varied list for the new lows. But it's not the kind of list you get when people think there is a recession coming soon. Instead, it says there is considerable rot underneath that we might not have known otherwise when we look at all of the deals and IPOs and SPACs that are being priced. Although the latter spells trouble, too — way too speculative. So where do I come out? We just had a huge move that was decapitated by Trump's tariff sword once again. To me, it was a depressing week because the speculation emanating from Figma, the endless bitcoin derivatives, and the Palantirs and next Palantirs are signs that nothing good is about to happen. We need Figma and Ciricle to be crushed if we are going to go anywhere. We need the fascination with stocks as crypto champs to die down. We need a return to the financials as leaders and techs as consolidators. Yes, we need to see consolidation in tech (and many other industries) to get things back on track. There is no sign of a pulse at the Justice Department or the Federal Trade Commission, so the time is right. Which leads me back to the Magnificent Seven and Apple . The quarter was good . Double-digit growth in revenue and earnings per share. Most encouraging: When I spoke to CEO Tim Cook, the need to put big deals on the radar screen was clear. The idea of something major in a finance vertical, now that the Goldman Sachs credit card deal is unraveling, is downright exciting. But the fact that this stock went down last week? Downright depressing. How bad? If it goes down big Monday, we're going to have to some major resetting of what works around here and it won't be good. 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