Oct 23, 2023
The past few weeks have seen a boom in merger and acquisition news. For starters, what was approaching a two-year-long process of Microsoft (MSFT) buying Activision-Blizzard finally went through in what would be one of the largest M&A deals of the past five years and the largest in Microsoft’s history. On top of that, there have been a number of new announcements this month, primarily in the energy space. Earlier this month Exxon Mobil (XOM) proposed a $60 billion bid for Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD), and Chevron (CVX) followed suit today with a $53 billion bid for Hess (HES). Additionally, while nothing is official yet, last week there were reports that Marathon Oil (MRO) and Devon Energy (DVN) have been in talks.
In the charts below, we show the pending counts and nominal dollar values of M&A deals by month over the past decade. As shown, the past few months have seen the number of deals ramping up with a record amount of activity based on dollar values. Perhaps more impressive has been the dominance of the Energy sector in these M&A announcements. As shown in the second chart below, they have accounted for over 80% of the value of these deals, the highest amount of the past decade.
Oct 19, 2023
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Looking for deeper insight into markets? In tonight’s Closer sent to Bespoke Institutional clients, we begin with comments on Fed Chair Powell’s remarks today (page 1). We follow up with a look at existing home sales (page 2) and home affordability (page 3). We then update our Five Fed Manufacturing Composite (page 4) before finishing with a review of today’s 5 year TIPS auction (page 5).
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Oct 19, 2023
Earnings season has begun with the release of quarterly results of the big banks and the first of the mega caps, Tesla (TSLA), this week. However, the slate doesn’t truly ramp up until next week and the week after. That is in terms of both the number of stocks reporting and their collective market caps. In the chart below, we show the cumulative market caps of Russell 1,000 stocks reporting each day from this week through the end of November. As shown, next Tuesday is the single most important day by market cap thanks to both Microsoft (MSFT) and Alphabet (GOOGL) reporting on the same day. That is followed by Meta Platforms (META) on Wednesday and Amazon (AMZN) on Thursday. While AMZN makes up a massive portion of the market cap reporting next Thursday, it is also one of the busiest days of earnings season in terms of number of companies reporting. That day, 126 Russell 1,000 members will release earnings. The only busier day will be the following Thursday with 129 stocks reporting. From there, earnings season will wind down but there will still be a couple more big reports like Berkshire Hathaway (BRK/B) on November 6th then NVIDIA (NVDA) on November 21st.
In yesterday’s Chart of the Day, we highlighted some stocks that have historically been the top performers on Q3 earnings. In a similar vein, below we show the Russell 1,000 members with at least three years of earnings history that have historically averaged the largest absolute daily move in reaction to earnings. For each stock, we also show its historical beat rates (% of time the stock has beaten consensus analyst EPS and sales estimates) and the percentage of the time that it has raised guidance.
As shown, BILL.com (BILL) tops the list as the most volatile stock on earnings with an average one-day change of +/-18.1%. Across its 15 quarterly reports as a public company, BILL has beaten revenue estimates every single time and missed EPS estimates just once. It has also raised guidance on 8 of its 15 quarterly reports. In addition to BILL, some other stocks that have been extremely volatile on their earnings reaction days include Roku (ROKU), Trade Desk (TTD), Pinterest (PINS), Unity Software (U), AppLovin (APP), Wayfair (W), Netflix (NFLX), Etsy (ETSY), Under Armour (UAA), Twilio (TWLO), and Zoom Video (ZM). This list is a who’s who of many stocks that both surged during the post-COVID bull market in 2020 and 2021 and then plummeted during the bear market of 2022.
