Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 12/3/24 – Software Picks Up the Slack
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“You never bet on the end of the world, that only happens once, and the odds of something that happens once in an eternity are pretty long.” – Art Cashin
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Futures indicate another trendless morning with extremely modest gains or losses depending on the index you want to examine. The economic calendar is on the light side, with October JOLTS being the only notable report. However, we will also hear comments from Fed Governor Kugler and Chicago Fed President Goolsbee later today.
Overnight in Asia, major equity benchmarks were higher across the board. The most notable economic report in the region was South Korean inflation which increased 1.5% y/y compared to a rate of 1.3% in October but was lower than the 1.7% consensus forecast. On the trade front, the Chinese government retaliated against the increased US export restrictions on advanced chip technologies by saying it would restrict certain rare earth materials to the US.
In Europe, stocks are also higher this morning, with the STOXX 600 trading up over 0.4%. In France, the CAC 40 was up close to 1% despite the political turmoil in the country. Opposition parties are on track to back a no-confidence vote to remove PM Michel Barnier.
Semiconductors make up a large part of the Technology sector, so the fact that the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index (SOX) has declined over 10% in roughly the last six months while shares of Nvidia (NVDA) are flat would lead you to believe that the overall sector has been weak. While it hasn’t been a leader, the Technology sector has rallied over 3% since NVDA and the semis peaked in the summer. A big reason for that strength is that as semis dropped the ball, software jumped in and dribbled it right down the court.
Since the closing high in the SOX on 7/10, the software group, as measured by the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF (IGV) has rallied over 20%. Through the close yesterday, IGV was 1.5 standard deviations above its 50-day moving average (DMA), but that’s down from more than three standard deviations above its 50-DMA on 11/11, which was the most overbought level since August 2020. All totaled, IGV has closed at overbought levels (1+ standard deviations above its 50-DMA) for 21 trading days.
The largest component in IGV, accounting for just over 9% of the ETF’s assets, is Salesforce (CRM). CRM had a rough start to 2024, and the bottom fell out of the stock in May when the company reported weaker-than-expected sales for the first time since 2006. As shown in the chart below, the 19.7% decline in reaction to that miss was the most negative reaction to an earnings report for CRM since it went public in 2004. It also marked the low for the stock, and it has rallied more than 56% since then.
While CRM shares are currently not quite as overbought as IGV, yesterday marked the 52nd day in a row that the stock closed at overbought levels. That’s the longest streak of overbought readings since its IPO 20 years ago!
The Closer – PMIs, Construction, Positioning Shifts – 12/2/24
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Looking for deeper insight into markets? In tonight’s Closer sent to Bespoke Institutional clients, we begin with a review of the latest PMI data (page 1) in addition to the latest construction figures (pages 2 & 3). We then review the latest positioning figures from the CFTC’s Commitments of Traders report (pages 4 – 7).
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Daily Sector Snapshot — 12/2/24
Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call Recaps: CrowdStrike (CRWD)
Bespoke’s Conference Call Recaps use AI to summarize lengthy earnings calls. The commentary below is AI-generated and then edited by Bespoke for quality control. As always, none of these summaries should be construed as recommendations to buy or sell any securities, and investors should do their own research and/or consult with a financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Our latest recap available to Bespoke subscribers covers CrowdSrtike’s (CRWD) Q3 2025 earnings call.
CrowdStrike (CRWD) is a cybersecurity company specializing in cloud-native endpoint protection and threat intelligence. Its Falcon platform leverages AI and machine learning to detect and prevent cyberattacks in real time, serving enterprises across industries, including healthcare, technology, and retail. CRWD surpassed $4 billion in ARR with 27% YoY growth. The Falcon Flex subscription model drove record module adoption, with customers averaging nine modules, while the company achieved over 150 Flex deals worth $1.3 billion in total value. Key wins included eight-figure deals in healthcare and retail, as well as growing adoption of Next-Gen SIEM (Security Information and Event Management), with ARR accelerating by over 150%. Recent innovations like Charlotte AI and the Adaptive Shield acquisition bolstered the company’s leadership in AI-powered cloud and SaaS security. Despite lingering impacts from the summer’s incident, retention remained resilient at over 97%, and CrowdStrike projects ARR reacceleration by late fiscal 2026…
Continue reading our Conference Call Recap for CRWD by becoming a Bespoke Institutional subscriber. You can sign up for Bespoke Institutional now and receive a 14-day trial to read our newest Conference Call Recap. To sign up, choose either the monthly or annual checkout link below:
Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call Recaps: Dell (DELL)
Bespoke’s Conference Call Recaps use AI to summarize lengthy earnings calls. The commentary below is AI-generated and then edited by Bespoke for quality control. As always, none of these summaries should be construed as recommendations to buy or sell any securities, and investors should do their own research and/or consult with a financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Our latest recap available to Bespoke subscribers covers Dell’s (DELL) Q3 2025 earnings call.
Dell (DELL) is a provider of technological infrastructure, servers, storage, and PCs. DELL is focused on advancing AI capabilities, data center modernization, and digital transformations. This quarter, the company reported strong AI server growth, with $2.9 billion in shipments and a $4.5 billion backlog, driving a 34% ISG (Infrastructure Solutions Group) revenue increase. The five-quarter pipeline grew over 50%, reflecting expanding demand across enterprise and Tier 2 cloud providers. Traditional servers saw double-digit growth, fueled by data center modernization. Despite a delayed PC refresh cycle, enterprise demand is expected to rise with Windows 10 end-of-life next year. Storage revenue climbed 4%, with double-digit gains in mid-range products like PowerStore. DELL emphasized its leadership in AI by launching advanced liquid-cooled servers and scaling the production of Blackwell designs. DELL shares fell more than 12% on 11/27 due to consumer PC weakness, even as there was good news in its AI-related business…
Continue reading our Conference Call Recap for DELL by becoming a Bespoke Institutional subscriber. You can sign up for Bespoke Institutional now and receive a 14-day trial to read our newest Conference Call Recap. To sign up, choose either the monthly or annual checkout link below:
November 2024 Headlines
United Back to Flying the Friendly Skies
Shares of United Airlines Holdings (UAL) have surged over 25% in the last month, taking their YTD gain to an incredible 140%. Last week, the stock even briefly traded above $100/share to new all-time highs. As shown in the chart below, all of this year’s gain occurred in the last four months as the stock was down on a year-to-date basis as recently as August 5th. While a chart like this may not be too surprising if you were talking about a high-flying tech or biotech stock, for an airline that’s been around for over half a century, it seems almost unbelievable.
The recent surge in UAL is almost an exact mirror image of what happened in early 2020 during the Covid outbreak. In less than four months back then, the stock plunged from the mid-$90s down to $17.80 per share as air traffic in the US ground to a halt and people feared Zoom meetings would replace business travel for good.
Putting it all together, a six-year chart of UAL is one of the stranger ones you’ll ever see. While the stock is trading at essentially the same levels it traded at five years ago, for more than two-thirds of the period in between, it has been in a drawdown of at least 50% from its pre-Covid all-time high.
While UAL has more than doubled this year, the same can’t be said for other US airlines. The snapshot below from our Trend Analyzer shows where each of the ten largest US traded airlines in the JETS ETF finished off November in terms of their performance and relative to their respective short-term trading ranges. While most of the stocks listed are all trading at short-term overbought levels, on a YTD basis, just four of the ten stocks shown have outperformed the S&P 500, and the only one with returns anywhere close to UAL is SkyWest (SKYW).
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Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call Recaps: Dick’s Sporting Goods (DKS)
Bespoke’s Conference Call Recaps use AI to summarize lengthy earnings calls. The commentary below is AI-generated and then edited by Bespoke for quality control. As always, none of these summaries should be construed as recommendations to buy or sell any securities, and investors should do their own research and/or consult with a financial professional before making any investment decisions.
Our latest recap available to Bespoke subscribers covers Dick’s Sporting Goods’ (DKS) Q3 2024 earnings call.
Dick’s Sporting Goods (DKS) is a US sporting goods retailer with brick-and-mortar stores and a digital platform. House of Sport (stores with goods as well as experiences like rock climbing, batting cages, golf simulators, and more) and next-generation 50,000 square-foot locations (which it calls Field House) continue to be major catalysts for excitement, attention, and traffic. On the digital side, DKS touched on its GameChanger app, a premier live-streaming, scheduling, communications, and scorekeeping platform for youth sports, which is expected to hit $100M in revenue this year. More broadly, management sounded bullish on sports, given the hype around women’s basketball, college football, and the World Cup in the US. In its latest report, DKS posted a 4.2% increase in comp sales driven by growth in back-to-school categories like footwear and team sports. Despite better-than-expected results, the stock fell 1.4% in reaction to the report on 11/26…
Continue reading our Conference Call Recap for DKS by becoming a Bespoke Institutional subscriber. You can sign up for Bespoke Institutional now and receive a 14-day trial to read our newest Conference Call Recap. To sign up, choose either the monthly or annual checkout link below:
Bespoke Market Calendar — December 2024
Please click the image below to view our December 2024 market calendar. This calendar includes the S&P 500’s historical average percentage change and average intraday chart pattern for each trading day during the upcoming month. It also includes market holidays and options expiration dates plus the dates of key economic indicator releases. Click here to view Bespoke’s premium membership options.
