Big Tech Just Saved The Stock Market

Welcome back, everyone. Today on the Joseph Carlson Show, we're wrapping up one of the biggest and most exciting weeks in the market with companies like Apple, Meta, Microsoft and Amazon just having reported their earnings. We're going to look over the earnings. I'll be reviewing them, going piece by piece looking at what

these companies actually did. We know that we had the quick takeaways that always happen after earnings, everybody looking at the incremental stock price change, and that's exciting. But I think it's good to take a little bit of a deeper look to look at the real picture of how these companies are developing. And that's what we're going to

be going through here. We're going to look at what's actually going on with Amazon, how this business is developing, whether investors should be more bullish on this company after this earnings or less. We'll be doing the same for Apple, Microsoft, and Meta. A full review giving clarity over these companies reports. These companies are all massive, complex businesses that have a lot going on, even to the investor to study them. There's a lot of developments

that are being missed. On top of that, we also have some other news to get to. For example, the jobs report came in last week. It was a bit higher than expected. Unemployment rate remains steady. We'll be going over that. We have Apple now making way for Spotify and other applications to make it easier to avoid the Apple App Store. Could this be the beginning of the erosion of the App Store monopoly that they've held for years?

And then finally, we also had the news that Grand Theft Auto 6 was delayed yet again, this time until May of 2026. Is this the most highly anticipated product of all time? We'll be discussing as well. We have all of that plus much more to get into. This is going to be a huge episode. And on a side note, if you want access to Qualtrim, if you've looked at this website, it's really good. I built it so I know that it's quality. It shows you all the visuals,

all the charts of a company. It gives you AI summaries of their strengths and weaknesses. You can look up any company and see an AI transcript summary that goes over all the major points discussed. It has a super easy to use discounted cash flow calculator where you can look at companies and project out earnings and cash flows.

And of course, it comes with an earnings calendar where you can see week by week the biggest, most important companies reporting earnings and see information about those earnings. Qualtrum is only $10 a month to begin with, but the reason that I mention it now is if you join the Patreon today, you'll get the entire month for free. So try it out if you haven't. I think you'll love it. Now let's go ahead and jump in to this week, which this was a

very important week. We know that we faced a lot of uncertainty in the market through tariffs. That's been the headline news for weeks now. As a a content creator or someone that talks about the news, really all I've heard over and over again in the stock market is tariffs, tariffs and tariffs uncertainty. In fact, I've heard a lot of chatter about American exceptionalism evaporating, the stock market declining.

There's people projecting this out years in the future, saying that basically this great thing that the US has built over decades of time, these wonderful companies, the success that we've had in the stock market here is over, and it's over because of the tariff policy. Now, going into this week, this was a test. It was a test to see if that narrative would hold up in the face of these great companies. And that test showed that the narrative wasn't quite accurate.

Many people over extrapolated and overestimated the negative news and the investors that bought the dip and held to their plan ended up winning once again. If we look at the market today, it is green. In the past one month period, it's in the green. So basically the entire month of April, this terrible month where it dropped 10% in two days, we are flat over the month.

If you were to fall asleep and go into a coma and just wake up a month later, you wouldn't really be able to recognize what happened to your portfolio. Only living through it day by day, were you able to have that concern, feel that pressure, but just holding out a little bit longer. You're not able to see it in the results. In the past year to date, the S&P 500 is down 3.1%. This is normal. This is just normal trading. As far as the stock market's concerned, it's not really

concerned at all. In fact, zooming out one year, we're up 12%, which is the annualized return of the stock market on a one year trailing basis. Even when we zoom into the QQQ now over time, the S&P 500 is becoming more similar to the QQQ, so it's not quite as different. It's down 4% year to date, Very similar results. When I look at My Portfolio, it shows a very similar picture. The story funds up 3.6% year to

date. The passive income portfolio, my much bigger portfolio is up .09% year to date. And I'm not alone in this. A lot of people have their portfolios in the green year to date. The people that stayed in the market and especially the ones that bought the dip. There's different voices you can listen to in the stock market and that does help direct your

decisions. There's the voices of people like Ray Dalio who sells books based around market crashes around saying that there's so many problems with the United States all the time that you should be wary and concerned. He thrives off of negative news, goes on to interviews talking about a reordering of the entire universe. He does this continually and his track record is that over the past couple of decades he's underperformed the benchmark

index. Both of his flagship portfolios have dramatically underperformed the S&P 500. Or you can listen to people like Peter Lynch, who outperformed the market dramatically over an 11 year period, having an annualized 33% returns. His advice is to ignore these people. Ignore the macro to invest in great companies, forget about the macro. Buy stocks that you know will grow earnings over time and you'll have good results. He says that there's always

something to worry about. Every single time, every situation, every decade, there's stuff to worry about in the market. Peter Lynch instructs investors to push those concerns aside. He says that money is made by the stomach, not by the brain. The people that can have a strong stomach and stay invested even though there's uncertainty, even though there's scary times happening, are the ones that end

up making money. The reason that I continue to invest the way that I do, the reason that I continue to buy high quality companies and hold on, no matter the macro environment, no matter the tariffs, no matter what news is going on, no matter the projections and predictions that people are making, is because I agree with the people like Peter Lynch. I disagree with the people like Ray Dalio. And I believe strongly the evidence shows that the investors that follow the Peter

Lynches make more money than the ones that follow the Ray Dalios. If you got concerned a month ago and sold your stocks at the lows of April, then you likely dramatically damage your returns. Holding on through those time periods and especially buying more of quality companies during those time periods is the better strategy. And there's going to be more of this in the future. This isn't the last scare the market's going to go through.

Eventually there will be more economic news and certainty policy news, something that scares investors. Once again, like Peter Lynch notes, it's easy to buy high quality companies. Anyone can do that. The tough part is not getting scared out of them. Now with that said, let's take a look at some of the earnings that really turned around this market. Out of the companies we'll be going over today, which is Apple, Ameta, Microsoft and Amazon, the one that really

turned the market around was Microsoft. Microsoft is up today another 2 1/2% to $436. This company was 350 just a couple weeks ago. In fact, year to date, Microsoft is up 4%. Biggest company in the world or very close to it with Apple is now 4% in the green. Over the past one month it's up 16.6%. Microsoft going up is a big deal, not just for Microsoft, not just because the vastness of this company or the market cap. This has knock on effects to

entirely different markets. Microsoft is a weathervane of all of US, business, business to business applications, software. If we look at Microsoft going up, this had a direct impact on Salesforce. We look at Salesforce, for example, this stock's up 2.36%, and you'll see these effects spread across industries because Microsoft is so emblematic of the rest of the market. When we look at Microsoft, one interesting thing to note is I talk about Google a lot on this

channel. We just review Google. We go over Google a lot because there's a lot to discuss, but one of the sleeper companies in My Portfolio overall, Microsoft, is a larger position across both of my portfolios. In Google, in the passive income portfolio, it's a $71,000 position. In the Story fund, it's a $22,000 position. Now, what did Microsoft do in this report that was deserving of an 8% update followed by a 2 1/2% update? Well, they just did everything

right. The company is the poster child of the perfect fundamentals. It's a company that has so many levers to pull, but they did all the most important things right. Not only did they be on the top line revenue and earnings per share estimate like they usually do, but the more significant part was the Microsoft Cloud and AI. This is top of mind for investors. It showed record quarter driven by Microsoft Cloud, which surpassed $42 billion in revenue, up 22% in constant

currency. So we still have a 22% growth rate here. Significant progress in expanding data center capacity. They open in 10 countries, boosting efficiency, reducing GPU lead times and cost cutting per token for AI workloads. AI and cloud are considered central to enabling business productivity, cost reductions and growth. Demand for cloud migrations is accelerating across industries and workloads.

We're into this AI transformation and the narrative that's being portrayed now from these CE OS is we're not like wrapping it up or even like 70 or 80% through it. It's just getting started. We're really on the way, just beginning this AI transition accelerating across industries. We have Microsoft maintaining its lead in regional availability, supporting mission critical workloads.

They mentioned constraints, saying clear demand and growth in AI infrastructure are leading to some temporary capacity constraints. The company is highly focused on balancing supply and demand for data centers and power regionally. So they mentioned that important word there that they're still constrained. They have so much demand, but they're trying to balance this

intelligently. One of the many bright spots of the Microsoft report was the Copilot, which Mark Benioff of Salesforce has referred to as Clippy 2 point O. But it turns out that a lot of people want Clippy. There's a lot of customers that Microsoft is selling Microsoft Copilot. Microsoft 365 Copilot adoption is broadening with hundreds of thousands of customers. Deal sizes are growing. The new updates enhancing AI

driven workload productivity. Copilot is enhanced with agent based features for specialized roles like sales and customer service. Copilot Studios let's organizations build custom agents including for document and workflow automation. Over 1,000,000 customer agents were created this quarter, 130% increase quarter over quarter, over double the amount of people using these agents in just one quarter. That's of course from a small base. This is a relatively new thing,

but it is rapidly growing. So Microsoft is another agenta company. And one of the things that's underrated by Microsoft, or at least a consideration in this company, is the reason why their copilot will be more successful than other companies. Random Co pilots is because companies are already integrated with Microsoft. They already trust the company with their data.

For example, if you're an accountant already using Microsoft software, you're much more likely going to be comfortable putting your financials into a copilot that Microsoft offers than a random one like Open AI or Grok. You're just not going to put in company financials to a third party AI. Microsoft 365 Dynamics, which is their ERP, continues to win deals. It's actually moving a bit upstream. There's more companies using this one. Microsoft is a social media company with LinkedIn.

The membership surpassed 1 billion, growing double digits, which increased engagement and video consumption. That's an underrated part of this company. They keep growing LinkedIn at a fast pace. We have the gaming category. This is where they announced big price increases. A lot of people are actually shocked by the price increases they're announcing. PC Game Pass revenue was up 45% year over year. Cloud gaming set a new record over 150 million hours played.

AI is being integrated into gaming with Copilot for gaming and real time gameplay generation by AI. Minecraft movie is a major hit, boosting the game's engagement by over 75%. You can go segment by segment of this business and they are firing on all cylinders. Microsoft is full steam ahead. Gross margins and operating income had strong growth. Commercial bookings and performance obligations both grew substantially, supported by

long term Azure commitments. Microsoft Cloud gross margins decreased slightly due to AI infrastructure build out, but overall company gross margins and operating margins remained high. All core business segments, productivity, business processes, intelligent cloud, more personal computing exceeded expectations with strong growth in Azure and related services. This last quarter was just incredible. But then more importantly, the commentary they had on the guidance also painted a better

picture. Remember that investors were saying this quarter is going to be good, but the problem is next quarter, that's when they're going to give really gloomy expectations. Well, that wasn't the case here. In their outlook, they said that Q4 guidance anticipates continued stable demand across commercial consumer, LinkedIn, gaming and search, basically every aspect of their business. They're saying things are holding steady.

There's ongoing AI driven margin pressure due to all the money they're putting into CapEx infrastructure. But this is showing that they're building this because they believe they have the demand. AI demand is growing faster than capacity availability, leading to some expected AI capacity constraints beyond June. Their overall outlook and guidance was just as strong as the previous quarter. Overall, top to bottom, it's tough to find anything to be

critical about this report. You can search with a fine toothed comb to try to find something that's bad about it, but there's just not much. If you refuse to have companies like Microsoft in your portfolio, you're going to have a very difficult challenge outperforming the index. Now next we get to Apple. This is another massive company.

In fact, I still believe that Apple is the largest company in the world. It bounces back and forth with Microsoft, but it might have traded over the past week. I think Microsoft may have actually beat them out. Apple's down 3 1/2 percent on the day, but it's still up over $200 per share, which is incredible because this company is facing a lot of challenges, a lot more challenges than I

believe Microsoft's facing. If we go into the results, the reason that Apple isn't cratering is because the company still puts up enormous numbers, numbers of cash flow, that they just dwarf other companies, even big companies. Apple reported revenue of $95.4 billion, up 5% year over year. Now that 95.4, that was the quarterly revenue, not the trailing 12 months. So they're making nearly $100 billion per quarter. Diluted earnings per share was

$1.65, up 8% year over year. Service revenue was disappointing. It set a new record at 26.6 billion. It was up 12% year over year, but this was below investors expectations and the company's gross margins declined a little bit. If we look at this more clearly and just look at what's going on with Apple, here's the issue I have with this company, my main concern, they just grew revenue by 5%.

We have 4.91% right there. If we zoom in to the past 10 years, Apple grew revenue a lot in 2020 as people were infused with cash by the government, lots of stimulus checks, people wanted to upgrade their iPhones and spend that money, and Apple soaked in a lot of that money like a sponge. But since then, it wasn't just pull forward. Apple's having a difficult time growing revenue outside of that

one time impact. Since around 2021, the companies had revenue grow just slightly low single digits and now they're eking out 5% revenue growth. When you have 5% revenue growth in your company that's already highly optimized for profits, there's not quite as much upside as other companies. Really what this company can do is grow it's services. They can try to grow services every single quarter, every year.

Apple's trying to build up this service business and they're facing a lot of resistance there as well. But we also have the news of the tariffs and supply chain. Although ALE doesn't give official commentary, the analysts really tried to dig into any information they could get. And overall, ALE was very resistant to sharing anything really meaningful. They kind of talked in circles when we look at some of the things that they did mention that we can dig out of this.

We have Apple announcing $500 billion U.S. investment over 4 years, including expanding team of facilities in many States and opening new advanced server manufacturing factory in Texas. And they highlight that Vietnam is the primary source for most iPad, Max Watch, Airpods products in the US. So they're highlighting here that they're not totally reliant on China. There's been the narrative that everything they do, everything they build is in China.

And they're trying to defuse that narrative while rapidly moving manufacturing elsewhere. The majority of Apple's global sales outside of the US still have China as a country of origin. Now, that's not as much of a problem because that doesn't face the US tariff. The estimated impacts from the tariff in the June quarter is still substantial, $900 million in additional costs. It's almost a billion dollars, which is just another tax they have to pay. That's a billion dollars off the

table. And that's with some unique mitigating factors flying planes of iPhones ahead of the tariffs. So if the tariffs stay on for the quarter beyond that, then they're not going to have these unique mitigating factors. The burden of the tariffs will be above 900 million. Apple right now is a combination of a lofty valuation, slower growth and challenges with manufacturing and tariffs.

But on the plus side, it's still a company that does so much buybacks, produces so much cash that even with all these challenges, it's still weathering through. It's still maintaining a lot of investor trust.

The next big tech company we get to 1 that's becoming increasingly stronger and stronger every single quarter is Meta. This is a company where I'm routinely and repeatedly impressed by their earnings. The strength of this company, They're now at 5% on the day after having a great day after their earnings, after having a great day after Google's earnings. So Meta is having quite the streak here. Look at this win streak from $484 up to 594.

It's still flat on the year, but Meta is on its way back up. Check out some of the numbers here. Meta's community continues to expand with over 3.4 billion people using at least one app daily. Daily. That's not a weekly user number. That's not a monthly, you know, monthly active users. No, Meta goes by days. Meta says you're going to be on our app within a a 16 hour day. You're going to visit one of our apps every single day. Half of you on planet Earth.

So half the people in this this globe that we're on are visiting one of their properties every day. This is no longer social media. In fact, I don't think Meta is is any longer just a social media company. This is like a, a framework. It's like an industrial framework for global communication. It's incredible the amount of engagement they have. If we look at this, visualize that the numbers are just staggering. And this is one of the things that I really did not anticipate.

I thought right around here that it was simply tapering off and slowing down. But they continue to push growth. They're now doing it through Reels, which is competing with with X or Twitter, and they're now past 3.43 billion users daily. Threads reach more than 350 monthly million active users and is on track to become Meta's next major social app.

So this is another property. They didn't have to buy this one or acquire it, and now it has hundreds of millions of users addicted to it. Video consumption is driving strong engagement with notable increases in time spent across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads. So people are now doing Instagram shorts, Facebook videos on Threads. There's all sorts of videos on it. They're getting into that content as well. There's AI strategy. Meta probably could more accurately be named AI, right?

They they went, Mark Zuckerberg at the time went with the name Meta because he was really into the metaverse, but then he pivoted hard towards AI. And really what this company is, is it's an AI company. Meta outlined 5 primary AI driven focus areas, improved advertising, more engaging experiences, business messaging, Meta AI, the personal assistant

and AI devices. Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that each area represents a long term investment downstream from Meta's goal of building general intelligence. And leading the AI model infrastructure. So we have all these competitors in AI. And right now Meta is taking a different approach. They're really going the open source approach. Now, open source, it has some caveats. So Meta will say that we just wanted to be completely open. We're trying to make it a level playing field, all of that.

But in reality, it's mostly open source. Even though they create it, they'll still have ultimate control. They'll have the leading models, they'll have a lot of ways to benefit from this open source. You can look at it in a similar way as Android being open source, the company that benefits the most from that is Google or Chrome being open source. The company that benefits the most from that, again is Google. Met is wanting to do the same thing for AI.

They mentioned on the call that advertising and monetization are both being enhanced dramatically by AIAI, significantly enhances ad targeting, creative generation, and campaign optimization. A growing amount of advertisers are using AI tools. New ad recommendation models such as GEM are delivering efficiency gains. The ad platform is evolving, evolving with solutions like Advantage plus incremental attribution, boosting conversion

rates for advertisers. And Meta has a lot of properties so far that don't have ads that they're just starting to monetize, Threads being one of them. By the end of this year, it's going to be a meaningful contributor to their bottom line. Now in terms of the capital expenditures, they're still

accelerating that. They know that there's going to be some higher cost, some of that due to the tariff for supply chain uncertainty, but the majority of the CapEx is still directed at Meta score business needs. So this is just to support the Meta business. Meta is investing to ensure it can meet internal demands for AI compute capacity, which remains A bottleneck to deploying new products and features. Once again, we have the word constraint or bottleneck when it comes to AI.

So you can look at these earnings and say that yes, Meta beat on the revenue and the earnings per share by a large degree. That understates what's going on with these businesses. This isn't just an earnings beat. These are companies that are positioning themselves for the next 15 to 20 years of this AI

wave. We have the overall strategic position of Meta. The company is positioning itself for leadership in the next wave of AI social computing by investing deeply in infrastructure, foundational AI models, and new devices. This was another superb report by this company. Even with the company trading at a 24 PE ratio, with reports like this and the strength and positioning, this stock is going to go higher. That's $600.00 per share. It's going to go higher.

Now finally we get to Amazon. This was possibly the most highly anticipated earnings of the week. This company is right in the epicenter of the discussions around trade policy and tariffs and Capec and AI. This one has it all in a single company, and Amazon has positioned as a company that really it's done a lot with the

fundamentals. I've highlighted how much Amazon has grown over the past five years, but the stock price doesn't really resemble it now when we look at the way that it's behaved after earnings, it initially dipped 4% and now it's in the green by 1%. That initial reaction to sell the stock is starting to fade. If we look at what happened with Amazon, the first thing to note is the company beat on the top and bottom line by a huge margin.

So of course them beating the estimates is a good thing, but there's a lot more important things going on with the company. We take a look at the financial performance. To start, Amazon reported in Q1 that revenue was $155.7 billion, up 10% year over year, that's excluding foreign exchange. Now, I mentioned that in Amazon, they typically give a range of guidance and around 80% of the time they come in at the high end of that range.

And they did, once again, 10% revenue growth on a constant, constant currency basis is very strong. So this company still growing top line really strong, even putting up numbers above $150 billion per quarter. It's incredible what this company's doing. Amazon's putting a ton of money into CapEx, pushing down their free cash flow. If you take out that CapEx investment, you have the operating income that's up 20%

year over year. So if you strip away some of the major investments they're putting in now, you get a decent idea of how much they're growing their underlying earnings power in the fulfillment and logistics. They notice that they're expanding into more rural areas. They're transitioning into regional fulfillment networks, stockpiling products closer to customers, resulting in record delivery speeds and increased same day, next day deliveries.

Better inventory placement is a major ongoing priority to improve in stock selection and reduce costs. This is stuff that will be ongoing for a long period of time as Amazon becomes more and more efficient over time. With advertising, they saw strong growth, $13.9 billion in revenue, up 19 percent year over year. That was above investors expectations. Advertising products span the funnel from brand awareness to conversion, covering properties like Prime Video, Twitch, IMDb,

live sports and 3rd party sites. They're creating more tool sets for advertisers, and advertising remains a major contributor to profits across all major segments. That's their way of saying it's very high margin, even though they're not giving us the margins directly when we get to AWS. This was initially one of the disappointing parts of Amazon's report. Microsoft reported their Azure number and it was way above expectations. It was growing super fast.

And then Amazon came in just light of expectations, 17% against 18% expected. Now, again, initially on the report when investors just saw the numbers, they saw them miss. But then Amazon came on the call. Andy Jassi explained that part of this miss was simply capacity constraints. They have a lot of server capacity that was constrained, too much demand and that should be relieved in the upcoming months.

They say significant demand for AI compute with capacity still being consumed as fast as it's added. They noted that over 85% of IT spend is still on premise. Major cloud migration potential remains. A lot of people are still focused only on AI. But Andy Jassi was trying to say it is still a big thing. Most of the world is still having IT on premise, so although we're really big in AI, there's still a huge growth path even without AI. AI is just like a bonus to their

growth path. The AI portion of AWS is now growing year over year by triple digits. In terms of the guidance and outlook, it was slightly weaker than investors expected on the operating income or EBIT outlook, but overall, the guidance was still strong. They notice that there's broad caution that remains due to uncertainty and macroeconomic factors.

When Andy Jassi spoke about the tariffs, he basically said that he has no way of knowing how the tariffs will settle, but they expect that tariffs will be around for some time in the future and they're prepared for that. It's not something that's going to destroy Amazon. This company remains resilient during uncertain environments, and they attributed that to their broad selection, pricing

and rapid delivery. They have many strategies in place to minimize the impact of the higher cost supply chain issues while maintaining customer trust. And the company remains very confident in their current positioning to capture the future growth in cloud, AI, e-commerce, logistics, advertising and their new long term ventures. They have a lot of initiatives like Project Hyper and many others.

Amazon has made it very clear leadership is in investment mode and neither you can get on board with that or you can leave. It's your decision. The company has done this again and again. When we look at Amazon's free cash flow, it paints a clear picture. We have time periods where the company's in profit mode where they're not really doing as many huge investments. That was back in 2018 to 2020. And then we had the pandemic.

They had a once in a lifetime opportunity to double the size of their fulfillment network, literally AA fulfillment network they've built over 10 years in only two to three years. That's investment mode. They went into investment mode in early 2020. They gave the green light to put 10s of billions of dollars in incremental CapEx, building out their fulfillment center and then they started to go back

into profit mode. But what happened during this time period when they're going into profit mode, AI happened. LLMS, these new models, this incredible opportunity for generative AI, for agentic technology, for all the efficiencies. And Amazon is a cloud company, one of the ones that can capture a lot of this demand. They can build this into an entirely new incremental business. So they went back into investment mode. That is what they're doing right

now. The reason the free cash flow is going down is the CapEx is going up. When we bring up the expenses, you can basically see the exact inverse of this relationship. We have the company dramatically increasing their CapEx in 2020, building out their fulfilment centers. Then they went back into profit mode when they have those efficiencies from those new

investments. And then they have AI show up and Andy Jassi once again gives the green light to not do buybacks, to not do dividends, to not do the short term decisions, but instead focus on building yet another massive business for investors, another pillar of Amazon, which is owning a significant portion of the new AI technology. Now we have CapEx going back up. The numbers look rough in the short term, but this is where investors have to make those

decisions. I'm not selling Amazon because I believe the decisions they're making, the investments they're making are highly attractive and I think they're wise decisions.

Right now, I believe this stock is worth around $260.00. So I'm still very bullish on it. I'm excited about the future. I'm not dissuaded at all about this report. I thought it was great across the board and I'm going to continue to hold. Now, let's go ahead and get to some news. First of all, we have the news. This is a little bit of economic news. Employers added 177,000 jobs in April despite tariff

uncertainty. Hiring slowed slightly from March's pace, while the unemployment rate held at 4.2%. So we added 177 and the expectations from The Economist was 133,000. This is just objectively good news. A lot of people would have assumed this will be much lower. In fact, I was one of them that I thought we'd see a bit more of a slowdown, a lot of tariff uncertainty. Maybe companies are pulling

back, but we don't see that. We saw good job numbers and the unemployment rate, which is a trailing indicator. But even for last month, it shows that it didn't go up at all. We still have very low unemployment in the US, So if these numbers are going to change, they just haven't so far. And this goes more to the point of the opening monologue of this episode, which is to not buy into every negative narrative

that you've seen. I repeatedly said that even though I don't like the tariffs, even though I don't think they're great, I'm going to continue to buy any tariff dip I see because overall economic news can change quickly. The tariffs themselves are not set in stone. They're decisions that are executive orders and positive news can come out that breathe new life into the markets.

This week we've seen huge companies from the United States still give optimistic outlooks and incredibly good earnings. We've seen economic data show that hiring remains strong and unemployment remains low. So far, the people that have been doomsday and bearish have been proven wrong. Now next we get to the headline which shows the continual unraveling of the iPhone App Store monopoly. This is yet another ruling against Apple.

Apple cleared a Spotify update to their app that under this new rule allows purchases within the app. Now not only does it allow purchases within the app, but it allows those without paying Apple. Up until now, if you have an iPhone and you have Spotify or Netflix and you don't have Spotify or Netflix account, if you go to sign up and you go to the premium versions, or if you try to sign up for Netflix just through the Apple device, it'll

say you can't sign up here. And they can't even direct you to the website from the app. Because if they do that, Apple will also want to cut whether or not you pay with Apple Pay or whether you just pay through the web. If you sign up through the device of Apple, Apple wants a cut and this ruling ruled against that. Now companies like Spotify and Netflix can inform customers in the app of how much their services cost and they can link

to the website to sign up there. And This is why Spotify is up so much today. We have Spotify up 8% on the day after this new app update cleared. Now Apple's not happy about this at all. Apple said on Wednesday it will comply with the court's order but strongly disagrees with the decision and will appeal. The judge, however, is even less happy with Apple than Apple is about this ruling. The judge said that Apple has wilfully tried to violate her ruling and held the company in

contempt. Additionally, the judge, Roberts wrote that Apple's Vice president of finance, Alex Roman, outright lied about when Apple had decided to charge a 20%, twenty, 7% fee on some purchases linked to its App Store. Rogers referred the matter to the US Attorneys to investigate whether to pursue criminal contempt proceedings on both Roman and Apple. So this is passed just judgments on app stores and policies over

transactions. Now we have the vice president, the finance of Apple potentially becoming a criminal, lying in court to the judge, intentionally deceiving them, which is of course, against the law. So this is going to be investigated and they'll decide whether or not to pursue criminal charges. This is escalated to a huge extent.

This brings in other concerns about Apple because if you have leadership having to go to all these court cases and testify, if they get things wrong or they intentionally deceive, if they're mixed into this at all, they have huge scrutiny on them. Executives don't want to be a part of this. They don't want to have scrutiny on them, potentially falsely testify or give any false information and be held in contempt or face criminal charges.

This may cause some leadership of Apple to rethink their positions in general. Overall, this is another huge incremental loss for Apple, a big win for Spotify and Netflix. These companies that have been restricted from sharing basic information are finally more free. Now finally we get to the real news here, the real important

topics of the day. Grand Theft Auto faces another delay. Grand Theft Auto 6 is delayed until May of 2026, which the means of this or that's going to happen before Grand Theft Auto 6 is released are just becoming more and more relevant. I mean, those are so accurate. Now. When I looked at this news, I thought, isn't it supposed to come out this year? And it was right. It was supposed to come out.

Now it's delayed until mid 2026. The official statement from Rockstar was that they're taking their extra time to deliver a level of quality you expect and deserve. That was it. Not much nuance or context there, but when I was thinking about this, I was thinking that Grand Theft Auto 6 may just be the most anticipated product of all time. What beats it? Can you think of anything that's more highly anticipated than

Grand Theft Auto 6? The trailer got record viewership and record amount of time. That trailer, by the way, for Grand Theft Auto 6 was in 2023. So the trailer was years old and they're delaying it until another year. This game is the most anticipated game of all time, by far. The last Grand Theft Auto was the most popular video game of all time. It exceeded almost any media of any type. It made more money than movies make. Made more money than music

makes. It's one of the most profitable pieces of media of all time, and this game is more anticipated than Grand Theft Auto 5. Try to think of one thing more highly anticipated than Grand Theft Auto 6. I don't think you can. It's going to be quite the day when this thing's released. That's going to be for this episode. Enjoy your weekend.