Here Comes Jerome Again

It’s only a slight exaggeration to say that Alphabet’s $GOOGL first-quarter earnings release was so positive it made up for Meta Platforms’ $META faceplant.

GOOGL surged more than 10 percent on Friday after management reported results for the three months ended March 31 after the market closed on Thursday.

META, which disappointed investors by boosting its AI spend and was down nearly 20 percent after reporting results on Wednesday, rose 0.43 percent on Friday.

Microsoft $MSFT followed through on Thursday evening’s promise with its own 1.82 percent rally on Friday, supported as well by solid AI investment and return.

And Tesla $TSLA seems to have regained the confidence of its base of believers with what appears to be a renewed commitment from Elon Musk to producing a lower-cost EV.

We’ll hear from Amazon.com $AMZN tomorrow after the market closes. The consensus forecast is for a 12 percent increase at the top line to $142.6 billion, according to FactSet. Earnings per share should rise 170 percent to $0.84.

The major item to track is growth for the Amazon Web Services cloud computing segment. Analysts want to see 15 percent year-over-year revenue growth to $24.6 billion.

That would mark a second straight quarter of accelerating growth for the segment after a fallow period for enterprise IT spending.

META got dinged for boosting its AI capex budget last week. It’ll be fun to track how people respond to AMZN’s AI budget plans.

Apple $AAPL will be the sixth of The Seven to report on Thursday. Nvidia $NVDA will report on May 22.

Those seven stocks have driven the market of late, but there are other companies out there with stories to tell and earnings to report, including Big Pharma and biotech names Amgen $AMGN, Eli Lilly $LLY, GSK $GSK, Merck $MRK, Novo Nordisk $NVO, and Pfizer $PFE.

We’ll also hear from ecommerce players eBay $EBAY, Paypal $PYPL, and Etsy $ETSY.

And old-school Dow Jones Industrials like Coca-Cola $KO, McDonald's $MCD, and 3M $MMM will report this week too.

This is a big deal.

BHP Group $BHP, the biggest miner in the world, confirmed that it made a $39 billion offer to acquire Anglo American Plc $AAL.L last week.

AAL management said BHP’s initial offer is “highly unattractive” and “opportunistic” and fails to properly value its prospects. Reuters reported that.

AAL probably has a point. BHP wants to consolidate its global copper position, and AAL owns two mines in Peru and Chile adjacent to existing BHP operations.

BHP’s bid and AAL’s rejection are likely to trigger competing bids from miners such as Glencore Plc $GLEN and Rio Tinto $RIO.

BHP’s bid was made under London Stock Exchange rules, which give it until May 22 to formalize its bid. Should BHP acquire AAL, it would become the biggest copper producer in the world, with approximately 10 percent of existing output.

The squeeze is coming from the demand side: According to Bloomberg, production from existing mines will decline sharply over the next decade, and miners will need to spend more than $150 billion through 2032 to keep up with forecast needs.

We’re living in a material world.

At least for the foreseeable future.