Notes
17 notes · Newest 28 Jul 2026
Coming up on our coverage
- IREN16 Sep 2026est.
- NKE28 Sep 2026est.
You’ll get a calibrated call on each before it drops.
With COIN down 60.1% from its 12-month peak into Wednesday's Q2 print, can subscription-and-services diversification and expense discipline offset a transaction-revenue engine that is still hostage to an exogenous crypto tape Margin does not forecast?
Going into the July 30 print, the binding question is no longer whether AWS is reaccelerating — it is at 28% growth, its fastest in 15 quarters — but whether operating income can land in the guided $20.0–24.0B band while free cash flow openly craters under an AI capex program running near a $170B+ annual pace. The Q1 headline (net income $30.3B, +77%) was flattered by a $16.8B pre-tax Anthropic mark that will NOT recur, so the Q2 print is the first clean look at whether the AWS margin can absorb the buildout. This is a two-sided setup: the P&L is inflecting up while the cash statement inflects sharply down, and the read hinges on an operating-income line the guide brackets tightly ($20–24B vs $19.2B a year ago) — a range wide enough to hide either a beat on Prime Day strength or a margin scare.
Apple heads into its July 30 (fiscal Q3) print off a March-quarter blowout — 49.3% gross margin, iPhone +22%, Greater China +28% — but the tension the print resolves is not the top line; it's whether the record margin can survive a cost squeeze Apple itself just flagged. In the Q2 10-Q, management warned that component supply constraints and rising NAND/DRAM/advanced-semiconductor prices are expected to "intensify" — a headwind that had not yet hit reported margins. The setup is asymmetric: the demand story is proven, so the print trades on the gross-margin guide and any language walking back the record. Watch whether June-quarter gross margin holds the ~47%+ band and whether management reiterates or softens the component-cost warning.
With HOOD down 33.4% from its October peak into a July 29 print, can prediction-market and net-interest growth keep out-running a crypto transaction line that has now halved for two straight quarters?
Into the July 29 print, Meta's binding question is no longer whether ads can grow — it's whether the ad engine can outrun the capex line fast enough to keep the market from repricing the AI build. Q1 gave both sides ammunition: 33% revenue growth and a 41% operating margin on one hand, a full-year capex range hiked to $125–145B on the other. The stock sits ~23% below its peak precisely because investors have stopped treating spend as free. The tension the Q2 print resolves: does the second-half revenue run-rate and any FY expense/capex revision confirm that monetization is compounding faster than the infrastructure bill — or does another capex step-up without a matching top-line acceleration validate the "spending unease" narrative Bloomberg flagged going into the week?
Tesla goes into its July 22 print with the strongest volume-and-margin setup in over a year — Q2 was its best-ever second quarter (~480K+ deliveries) and Q1 gross margin had already recovered 478bp YoY to 21.1% — yet the number that matters is operating margin, which fell to 4.2% in Q1 as AI/autonomy opex rose 37% YoY. The binding question the print resolves: is the core auto business now healthy enough to fund the robotaxi/Optimus build-out, or does the spend outrun a margin recovery that itself leans on a shrinking regulatory-credit crutch? That question is being asked into a week of autonomy setbacks — fresh federal robotaxi safety scrutiny, a rejected recall bid, and shareholders publicly pressing Musk on missed autonomy targets — which is exactly the narrative that carries the multiple.
Netflix goes into Thursday's print down 42.4% with the week's headlines — WSJ, Yahoo, Bloomberg — all reframing it as a slowing-growth, engagement-plateau story; but the last hard filing still shows +16% revenue growth and we have no current-quarter numbers to confirm the turn: does the July 16 guide validate the slowdown the narrative is already pricing, or expose it as a story the filings don't yet support?
Q2 (July 14) is the first "unshackled" print worth judging on its own terms: with the Fed's asset cap gone, Wells is finally growing the balance sheet — avg assets +13% YoY to $2.17T, loans +10%, deposits +6% — but net interest margin is compressing hard (2.47% in Q1'26, down from 2.67% a year earlier). The binding question is whether volume can keep outrunning price: NII rose 5% YoY in Q1 purely because balance-sheet growth offset a 20bp margin squeeze. If Q2 NIM keeps sliding and loan growth cools, the "growth story" thins to a rate story the market has already discounted — which is why the stock trades at a persistent discount despite the regulatory overhang lifting.
Going into Monday's Q2 print, the binding question isn't whether JPM beats — Q1 already ran red-hot (net income $16.5bn, ROTCE 23%, NII +9%) — but whether management RAISES the ~$103bn full-year NII guide it set in April, and whether a likely one-time Visa share-exchange gain flatters an otherwise clean quarter. The bull case is that resilient rates, a Markets/IB tailwind, and benign credit push NII toward the high end; the bear case is that the guide was already conservative-by-design and the stock, sitting ~1% off its 12-month high, prices in perfection. Watch NII and the Card net charge-off trajectory against the 3.4% full-year guide: those two numbers, not headline EPS, resolve whether the setup deserves the premium.
Goldman goes into its July 14 Q2 print with the investment-banking recovery as its bull case — Advisory revenue nearly doubled YoY in Q1 on a rebound in completed M&A — but two things the reader should hold going in complicate the story: the IB fees backlog actually ticked *down* versus year-end 2025, and FICC was the Q1 soft spot (-10% YoY). The binding question the print resolves is whether the deal pipeline is converting into fees or stalling, and whether FICC normalizes now that Q2's equity backdrop recovered from Q1's -5% S&P quarter. Watch backlog commentary and the FICC line: a re-acceleration confirms the franchise is firing on all cylinders; a second soft FICC quarter plus a flat backlog would reframe the 14%+ ROE as advisory-cycle-dependent rather than structural.
Citi enters its July 14 Q2 print having run Q1 RoTCE (13.1%) two-plus points above its own ~10-11% full-year 2026 target — the binding question is no longer "is the turnaround real" but "is mid-teens returns a run-rate or a Q1 markets-seasonality peak?" A $30B buyback authorization launched in June says management is betting on durability; the Q2 line to watch is whether RoTCE holds double digits once Q1's trading tailwind fades and whether U.S. card spend (down 9% sequentially in Q1) is a wobble or a trend.
BAC goes into its July 14 Q2 print at a record share price on the back of a late-June NII guidance upgrade — but the number that actually matters is whether net interest income reaccelerates after Q1'26 FTE NII came in essentially flat sequentially ($15.9bn vs 4Q25's $15.9bn), snapping the multi-quarter run of clean sequential gains. The bull case says fixed-rate asset repricing plus an 11th straight quarter of deposit growth reignites the NII curve; the bear case is that the plateau is structural now that the rate tailwind has faded. Complicating the read: management leaned hard into buybacks ($7.2bn in Q1, $9.3bn total returned) and let CET1 slip to 11.2%, so a soft NII print with less capital cushion is a less forgiving setup than the record price implies.
Delta prints Q2 tomorrow with the stock parked near 12-month highs — which means the setup is asymmetric: the backward-looking beat is largely priced, and the reaction will hinge on the forward outlook, not the actuals. UBS has framed the guide as the swing factor, and the binding question is whether management re-commits to a firm full-year framework after a demand-rattled first half, or hedges. The bull case rides Delta's premium/loyalty mix and its aggressive fare-segmentation push (the just-launched "Basic Business" and reworked fare ladder) as evidence it can defend unit revenue even in a softer macro; the bear case is that a company trading at the top of its range has little cushion if the guide is merely in-line or vague.
Levi enters its July 8 Q2 print with the highest bar it has set in years: management already raised full-year sales, margin AND EPS guidance in April on the back of a 9% organic Q1, so the print won't be judged on "did it grow" but on whether the raise holds. The binding question is margin: gross margin actually slipped to 61.9% in Q1 as tariffs bit, and the company is spending into a "Behind Every Original"/FIFA-heavy advertising cycle — so the tension is whether accelerating DTC and pricing power can absorb both tariff cost and elevated ad spend without a guide-down. A wildcard sits underneath: Levi paid ~$80M of IEEPA tariffs that a February Supreme Court ruling made potentially refundable, an optionality that could flip the margin narrative if management quantifies it on the call.
With the stock down 48.6% from its 12-month peak, can Elliott Hill's "Win Now" reset show enough North America wholesale traction and a credible FY2027 gross-margin recovery path to offset the ~$1.5B annualized tariff hit, deteriorating Greater China (-10% CC) and a collapsing Converse — or does tomorrow's print confirm the turnaround is still all cost and no inflection?
FedEx's June 23 print is the last look at the old company — a consolidated, May-fiscal-year FedEx that still includes the Freight business spun off June 1. The binding question isn't FY2026 EPS (management already raised the bar to $19.30–$20.10 adjusted in March); it's the FIRST FY2027 guide for "new FedEx" — an Express-led, calendar-year, Freight-less entity carrying tariff and trade-policy uncertainty the company says it cannot yet quantify. The bull case is that >$1B of structural cost-out plus 5%+ domestic yields keep margins climbing even as Freight leaves; the bear case is that international export weakness, the IEEPA tariff reversal, and a grounded MD-11 fleet pressure a stub-period guide that the Street has no clean comparable for. Watch the FY2027 framework, not the trailing quarter.
Carnival goes into its June 23 Q2 print with a record booked position but a guidance bar that has quietly stepped down: management is guiding Q2 net yields to just +2.0% constant-currency, versus the +2.7% it actually delivered in Q1 and the ~+5% it ran in 2025. The binding question for the print is whether that deceleration is genuine demand cooling or simply conservative tougher comps plus fuel drag — and whether the +150bp Q1 yield beat repeats. With ~85% of 2026 already on the books at "historically high prices," the demand setup is de-risked; the watch item is a softening North America occupancy (-1.3pts in Q1) that bears can read as the first crack in the pricing-over-volume strategy.