Market indexes did a head-fake right at the end of the regular session this first trading day of a new week. After dipping at or near session highs within a half hour til the closing bell, the major indexes rallied to as high as flat on the day. Officially in the red across the board, today was pretty much a wash. The Dow was -0.11%, the Nasdaq -0.14%, the S&P 500 -0.02%. The small-cap Russell 2000 had the hardest climb, -0.74%.
Even though Q1 earnings season is definitely upon us (even if Springtime still isn’t in many parts of the country), Wall Street remains somewhat captivated by the “Elon Musk Buying Twitter” story. Not because it affects all too many investors, but because
Tesla
TSLA
CEO Musk is known to be someone who only has big ideas. And if he can pay $43 billion to have his own social-media sandbox — without worrying much, if at all, about profitability — then this might be a bigger story than just a standard acquisition.
Twitter
TWTR
itself could use some sprucing up — it has Value and Momentum grades of D, a Growth grade of F. CEO Jack Dorsey looks to leave his post at the end of May, and Musk took the opportunity to point out the remaining board owns very little of the company. Dorsey, who has retained dual-CEO positions with both Twitter and Block (SQ — to which he’s added a full dimension during his tenure), makes it clear his displeasure with Twitter’s board — which he has called “dysfunctional” — but not so clear the reasoning behind his displeasure.
The social media staple reports earnings two weeks from Thursday, but in the meantime, people are very curious to see if Twitter will take Musk’s money and run, or if they will put up more of a fight to ensure a certain integrity to the brand it risks losing in the hands of Musk. The executive who also runs SpaceX insists there would be oversight to disallow tweets pertaining to violence and the like, but where Musk himself draws the line no one — maybe not even himself — knows at this point. Plus, when could he possibly find the time for all this?
Transportation major
J.B. Hunt
JBHT
easily surpassed estimates on both top and bottom lines in its Q1 earnings report after the bell today. Earnings of $2.29 per share outpaced the Zacks consensus of $1.91, and grew nearly 50% year over year. Revenues of $3.49 billion in the quarter beat the $3.26 billion expected and are +33% from its year-ago quarter. Higher customer rates and higher volumes led the strong quarter for the Zacks Rank #2 (Buy)-rated company.
Tomorrow, we expect earnings from
Johnson & Johnson
JNJ
and
Lockheed Martin
LMT
in the morning,
Netflix
NFLX
and
IBM
IBM
after the closing bell. Along with these, we’ll also see new data on domestic Housing Starts and Building Permits.
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