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…
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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…
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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…
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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.
Chart of the Day: November Recap + December Seasonality
Bespoke’s Morning Lineup – 12/2/24 – The Beginning of the End
See what’s driving market performance around the world in today’s Morning Lineup. Bespoke’s Morning Lineup is the best way to start your trading day. Read it now by starting a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium. CLICK HERE to learn more and start your trial.
“Here’s your law: If a company, can’t explain, in one sentence, what it does… it’s illegal.” – Lewis Black
Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.
Global equities kicked off December positively as most Asian equity benchmarks finished the first trading day of the month with gains of between 0.5% and 1.0%. In China, the 10-year yield fell to a record low just below 2% after the country’s services PMI came in weaker than expected at 50.0 even as the Manufacturing component increased modestly to 50.3. While growth in China remained anemic, Japan’s Manufacturing PMI remained in contraction territory for the sixth month.
In Europe, equities have also gotten off to a positive start in December although the magnitude of the gains has been more modest with the STOXX 600 trading up just under half of a percent. Manufacturing in the region remains in contraction as the PMI index fell from 46.0 to 45.2 for its 29th straight month below 50.
US equity futures were modestly higher earlier but have now dipped slightly into negative territory as we await the December release of the ISM Manufacturing report. While it hasn’t been quite as weak as its European counterpart, the ISM index is expected to remain below 50 for the eighth month in a row and the 24th time in the last 25 months. It will be interesting to see, though, if the election results had any impact on manufacturers’ sentiment.
December 2nd may not seem like much of a day to most people, but today marks the 23rd anniversary of Enron’s bankruptcy filing. At the time, Enron was the largest corporate bankruptcy in US history, but 23 years later, it only ranks as the ninth largest. At an estimated $66 billion, Enron’s bankruptcy was less than a tenth of Lehman’s (largest ever) which occurred less than seven years later, and a fifth the size of Washington Mutual which collapsed just after Lehman. The fact that Enron’s bankruptcy was so large at the time but now pales in comparison to some of the largest illustrates once again how despite the power and strength of the US economy, never underestimate the ability of companies to screw things up and ultimately screw their employees, customers, creditors, and shareholders.
Enron’s bankruptcy hit the market at a particularly vulnerable time. Just over two months earlier, the bottom had fallen out of the market following the 9/11 attacks, but the market quickly rebounded giving hope to investors that the whoosh lower when the markets re-opened in September had been a market clearing event. Enron’s bankruptcy stopped the rally in its tracks, and after treading water for a few months, the bottom fell out of the market again as accounting scandals at Tyco and WorldCom hit the market. Enron may not have been the sole cause of the post-9/11 rally losing steam, but in bear markets, there’s always something.
Turning to the present market, the Treasury market has done its best to confuse markets in the last few months. In early September, all you would hear about was how the start of the Fed easing cycle would unleash a period of lower rates and ease borrowing costs for Americans. While short-term rates declined, the Fed has little control over the long end of the curve, and the 10-year yield made its low for the year just before the September cut. From there, the yield marched steadily higher.
Then, leading up to the election, a Trump victory was considered a harbinger of higher rates as lower taxes would balloon the deficit. The verdict is still out on what a Trump Administration will mean for the deficit as he’s not even in office, but once again, nearly the exact opposite occurred. Yields peaked shortly after the election and finished off November 11 basis points lower than where they started the month.
It’s not just longer-term Treasuries that have rallied, though. The snapshot below from our Trend Analyzer shows the performance of various Treasury and fixed-income-related ETFs. Not only have they all rallied over the last week, but they’re also mostly at or above their 50-day moving averages (DMAs).
Brunch Reads – 12/1/24
Welcome to Bespoke Brunch Reads — a linkfest of some of our favorite articles over the past week. The links are mostly market-related, but there are some other interesting subjects covered as well. We hope you enjoy the food for thought as a supplement to the research we provide you during the week.
The Sitting Seamstress: On December 1st, 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus. The 42-year-old seamstress boarded the Cleveland Avenue bus and sat in the section reserved for black passengers. Eventually, the bus reached a point where every seat was occupied leaving a white man standing. The bus driver, James F. Blake, demanded that Rosa and three other black passengers give up their seats. While the others reluctantly moved, Rosa didn’t budge.
Parks later recalled that her refusal wasn’t because she was physically tired but tired of giving in. Her refusal to stand was a quiet act of defiance that sparked something huge. She got arrested and fined, but her resistance galvanized the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Led by a young Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., this 381-day standoff against the bus system became a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement, eventually leading the Supreme Court to declare bus segregation unconstitutional. Rosa Parks’ arrest wasn’t just about a seat on a bus; it was about standing up by sitting down, a moment that inspired a movement for equality and justice.
Health & Wellness
Deflating Boobs, Shrinking Butts and Little Lips: The De-Kardashian-ification of America (The Hollywood Reporter)
The over-the-top Kardashian look is fading, replaced by a trend toward more natural, subtle cosmetic tweaks. People opt for things like lifts, smaller enhancements, and “tweakments” that freshen up their look without going overboard. Overfilled faces and dramatic fox-eye lifts are on their way out, while guys are jumping in for sharper jawlines inspired by Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise. Even smiles and skin care are getting upgrades, with AI-designed veneers and regenerative treatments making everything feel more custom and low-key. [Link]
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