Vital Dawn Podcast for Wednesday May 6

Welcome to the Vital Dump Podcast for Wednesday, May 6. U.S. equity futures are seeing strong gains so far this morning. S&P futures are up 46 points. That's about 65 basis points. Russell futures are up 29 points. That's about 1%. NASDAQ futures are outperforming up 325 points. That is about 1.1%. And then DAF futures are up 280 points, which is about 58 basis points. In Europe, the major indices are up over 2%. strong gains in Europe, participation for most of the major subgroups. You're seeing outperformance in autos, industrials, luxury basic resources, banks, insurance, and retail. You're seeing underperformance in energy utilities, telecom, and energy. And then in Asia, you saw gains pretty much across the board. The Nikkei, I'm sorry, Japan was closed. The Hang Seng rose about 1.2%. Shanghai Comp also was up 1.2%. Korea KOSPI surged over 6%. Continued massive gains in a lot of the key chip stocks in Korea. So green across the board for equities this morning. Two big talking points, two big themes. So Iran and tech. And remember, these two have been driving equities now for the last several weeks. So strong tech earnings and then Iran optimism. So on the Iran front Trump last night announced that he was suspending this quote unquote Freedom Initiative that he had just announced days previously He cited progress in talks with Iran great progress in talks with Iran as the reason why that was being suspended And then this morning, just a little bit ago, Axios posted an article talking about how the U.S. and Iran are closing in on an agreement on a one-page memorandum of understanding that would, quote-unquote, end the war and set the stage for more substantive nuclear negotiations. Um, unclear what all that means. Um, you know, I think my views on this have really been unchanged now for the last several weeks. It's been extremely clear that Trump is very, very reluctant to escalate militarily. Um, and so he's, he's continued to kind of push for some type of a negotiation, some type of a compromise. It looks like that might be coming to fruition. Um, you know, the details are very much up in the air. I write in the piece about how, again, it's positive to end the war, but it's been largely the consensus view that this was going to arrive. And again, a vague kind of non-binding memorandum of understanding is not a full and final agreement that resolves core issues that caused this war to begin in the first place Hormuz is going to be changed permanently given what occurred So for a variety of reasons I think, again, it's not negative, but for equities at least, it's largely priced in. You could have much more significant moves on oil. Oil's down a lot this morning and treasuries in particular. Stocks have rallied a lot more than yields have fallen and have rallied a lot more than oil has declined. So you could have some catch-up moves in those non-equity markets. But I think for stocks, a lot of the Iran optimism is largely priced in. On earnings, there were a ton of earnings out last night in the US, a lot in Europe this morning. So take a look at the full piece. I have details on everything. The big standouts are in tech. So AMD in particular, AMD had very, very elevated expectations coming to this report. We've had weeks of very robust chip earnings. But the stock is still up nearly 20% of pre-market trading. So they managed to obviously exceed elevated expectations. And a bunch of other tech names also are rallying in pre-market trading on back of their results. So you have continued melt-up in tech especially melt in chip stocks The other big tech headline was an article from the Information last night about how Anthropic has committed to spending billion on Google technology over the next five years That has Google outperforming among the MAG7 stocks in pre-market trading. I thought more significant was a statistic in that article about how 50%, so half of the revenue backlog for Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle is all tied back to just two companies, Anthropic and OpenAI. I thought that was a pretty astounding statistic. So those are the main highlights for this morning. There was a lot of other news. And like I said, there was a ton of earnings. So take a look at the full piece for all the details on the calendar for today in terms of scheduled news. The focus will be on earnings before the US Open, Apollo, Instacart, CVS, Disney, Kraft, Marriott, Uber are the highlights. We'll get the ADP jobs report for April at 8.15. Treasury quarterly for refunding announcement at 8.30, Corning Analyst Meeting at 9 a.m. And then after the close, earnings, the highlights will be Arm, DoorDash, and a couple of others. But we're definitely, as I said, we're in the final stages of the calendar Q1 season. The April 1 reporting season kicks off next week with Cisco. And that is everything for today, Wednesday, May 6. Thank you, everyone, for listening.