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“Lots of companies don’t succeed over time. What do they fundamentally do wrong? They usually miss the future.” – Larry Page

Morning stock market summary

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

Did you feel the breeze yesterday just after the close? Wall Street breathed a collective sigh of relief after the close yesterday, and instead of Alka-Seltzer coming to the rescue it was Alphabet (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) which both reported strong Q1 results. The gains in these stocks (and others) have helped offset the indigestion from Meta Platforms (META) after the close on Wednesday and Thursday morning’s whiff of stagflation. The only thing standing between now and a good finish to the week for equities was the 8:30 release of Personal Income, Personal Spending, and the PCE Deflator, and then after that, the 10 AM release of the UMich Sentiment report. Regarding the 8:30 data, Personal Income was in line with forecasts (0.5%), Personal Spending was higher than forecasts (0.8% vs 0.6%), and the PCE data was in line with forecasts. Bulls have taken the inline PCE data and run with it as investors had been positioned for a hotter reading.

24 hours ago, we were talking about how the decline in META was on pace to be one of the largest ever single-day declines in market cap on record. Today, it’s the opposite as the 12% gain in Alphabet (GOOGL) is on pace to be the second largest single-day increase in market cap ever. The chart below shows the largest ever single-day market cap increases in individual stocks on record and is based on data from a Bloomberg story in late February when Nvidia (NVDA) set the single-day record with a one-day gain of $277 billion. If these in GOOGL hold throughout the day, it will be the stock’s first entry on the top ten list compared to the four for Apple (AAPL), two for NVDA, and one each for Meta Platforms (META), Amazon.com (AMZN), and Microsoft (MSFT). MSFT is shown in the chart twice, but if the gains in GOOGL hold, the MSFT entry from 4/26/23 will fall off the list.

With its 12% increase this morning, shares of GOOGL are trading at an all-time high of $175. That’s not bad for a company whose critics have been saying fthat the company missed the AI future.

Shifting focus from Technology to the world of Industrials and real “stuff”, Caterpillar (CAT) got plowed yesterday after reporting weaker-than-expected revenues and noting that  Q2 sales would be lower than they were in the same quarter in 2023.  The stock fell over 7% and closed below its 50-DMA for the first time since November 30th.

Yesterday’s decline ended a streak of 99 trading days that the stock closed above its 50 and 200-day moving averages. That ranked as tied with three other periods for the sixth-longest streak of closes above both moving averages in the last forty years. We couldn’t help but notice that five of the eleven streaks shown lasted longer than 90 trading days but shorter than 100.  Something about those streaks not being above to get into triple-digit lengths!

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