TeeJay Tech Bro

  Caterpillar, it seems, has grown wings. Thanks to the massive buildout of AI data centers, the construction, mining and engineering equipment giant is booking customers faster than 4 Charles Prime Rib . Shares in the industrial bellwether have gained 48% this year, symbolic of wider bets many investors are placing on companies that stand to benefit from the real-world infrastructure needs of hyperscalers. But despite its latest earnings beat, some notable analysts and investors say Caterpillar isn’t giving them butterflies. Bulldozers for Buildouts Caterpillar’s second-quarter sales rose 24% year over year to a record $20.5 billion in the second quarter, with operating profit climbing 50% to $4.3 billion. Crucially, the company’s backlog surged to $72.1 billion, up 92% from a year ago. CEO Joe Creed said on a call with analysts that some orders run to 2030, offering years of locked-in revenue. That mirrors the continued AI capex spending spree that McKinsey estimates could requi...

  Industrial and engineering giant Fluor reports quarterly earnings this morning, and if they’re anything like the last go-round, Wall Street might be due for more disappointment.  But there’s reason to believe the sagging company may finally have some wind in its sails. Slowly but surely, the seemingly decade-long bipartisan push to reshore US manufacturing is starting to show up in the data. Manufactured Consent US manufacturing activity expanded at the fastest pace since May 2022 this July, according to the latest Institute for Supply Management data earlier this week. The gauge has now registered growth every month so far this year, after getting stuck in a prolonged contraction phase in all but two months going back to October 2022. New order growth increased as well. “My gut is, it’s not just a one- or two-month trend,” Susan Spence, chair of the ISM Manufacturing Business Survey Committee, told reporters on Monday. “Companies are seeing six or more months of these solid...

  SpaceX isn’t the only company in the solar system to outperform Wall Street’s expectations this summer. Corporate America has delivered enough stellar second-quarter financial reports to send the S&P 500 to a record high on Tuesday. Some 86% of reporting companies exceeded consensus earnings-per-share estimates as of Friday last week, according to FactSet data, well above the 67% historical average, and investors spread the love far beyond the typical market-carrying names. Still, there are plenty of potential pitfalls that could stop the rollicking party in its tracks. Strait Flush Undergirding the rally was belief that the Iran-US war is nearing a conclusion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took to CNBC on Tuesday to declare “we may have a deal today or tomorrow to open the Strait [of Hormuz] and move towards a more normalized position in this conflict.” Yes, that may be the umpteenth time a looming resolution has been floated, but markets were happy to hear it nonetheless...

  They’re a picky bunch on Wall Street lately. Will Palantir, when it reports its latest quarterly results this afternoon, have enough good news? Despite a better-than-expected $1.6 billion revenue haul in the first quarter , an 85% year-over-year gain, shares in the software and data analytics giant have tumbled 31% in 2026. An aggressive second-quarter sales forecast of $1.8 billion, representing an 80% increase, couldn’t summon the momentum to escape this year’s protracted selloff of software holdings, either. Whatever today’s result, options pricing suggests traders expect a dramatic swing of up to 10%. So strap in. American Brand Best known for its Gotham platform, built for government, defense and intelligence organizations, the company boosted US government revenue by 84% year over year to $687 million in the first quarter. There’s also Palantir’s commercial side, where its Foundry operating system and Artificial Intelligence Platform provide tools to help companies manage t...

  SpaceX isn’t the only company in the solar system to outperform Wall Street’s expectations this summer. Corporate America has delivered enough stellar second-quarter financial reports to send the S&P 500 to a record high on Tuesday. Some 86% of reporting companies exceeded consensus earnings-per-share estimates as of Friday last week, according to FactSet data, well above the 67% historical average, and investors spread the love far beyond the typical market-carrying names. Still, there are plenty of potential pitfalls that could stop the rollicking party in its tracks. Strait Flush Undergirding the rally was belief that the Iran-US war is nearing a conclusion. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent took to CNBC on Tuesday to declare “we may have a deal today or tomorrow to open the Strait [of Hormuz] and move towards a more normalized position in this conflict.” Yes, that may be the umpteenth time a looming resolution has been floated, but markets were happy to hear it nonetheless...

  Even a killer earnings report may not be enough to help SpaceX stock escape the gravitational pull of lockup expiration dates. Not that sky-high financials are exactly expected at today’s inaugural quarterly earnings call for Elon Musk’s rockets and AI empire.  The real test for the newly public firm comes this Thursday, when a major tranche of insider shares exit their lockup period. The expiration could fuel a selloff that sends its share price, already down some 20% from its IPO, even lower. Rest assured, short-selling sharks are betting on it. (Space)X-it Strategy When SpaceX debuted at $135 per share in early June, 640 million shares, or less than 5% of total shares, were made available to the public. On Thursday, after the company has already shed hundreds of billions in value since its debut, employees and early investors will be able to sell another 911 million shares, amounting to another 12% of the company’s total.  That creates even stronger headwinds for the...

  Uber could be the next Blockbuster — or Kodak, Polaroid, Borders … any company that was rendered irrelevant by new tech. But the ride-hailing giant is putting the autonomous pedal to the metal to avoid that fate.  After reporting slowing growth and soft guidance, Uber saw its stock fall nearly 8% Wednesday. While Uber’s revenue rose 12% for the second quarter, that was a step down from its 14% growth the same time last year. Revenue from its delivery business jumped 28%, and riders took 3.9 billion trips, up 18% But that could all be in the rear-view as investors focus their attention on Uber’s place in the robotaxi race .  Hands Off the Wheel Uber pledged yesterday to pour more than $10 billion into building its autonomous-vehicle business with a near-term goal of putting 120,000 driverless vehicles on the road. The company that flipped the taxi industry on its roof thinks its 200 million-strong customer base will help it become the long-term winner when it comes to dr...

  As prognostications go, this one was about as grim as the beadle’s rejoinder to a hungry Oliver Twist on the availability of more soup. “Assume there is no search,” Condé Nast CEO Roger Lynch recalled  telling  the company’s many publications during a recent episode of the TBPN podcast. In other words, assume publications such as  The New Yorker  and  Wired  will, one day soon, no longer derive visitors from Google Search results. He’s not alone in forecasting a massive change in the flow of internet traffic. It’s what some digital experts are calling the “zero click” or “no click” future, in which internet users primarily access the web via artificial intelligence chatbots, and rarely, if ever, click away from said chatbots. While Lynch’s prediction may be a bit of an exaggeration, it’s only a bit. Indeed, as remote as a “no click” future might seem, the “low click” age has already arrived (and Lynch quickly caveated that search traffic would drop ...

  Beijing and Washington are playing a game of robot chicken as trade tensions over humanoid tech escalate.  China’s commerce ministry on Thursday threatened to retaliate over the Federal Communications Commission’s ban on foreign-made robots. The FCC said two days before that it was adding advanced robotics, including humanoid and quadruped robots, to a list of restricted imports. The tech poses cybersecurity risks that could threaten critical infrastructure, according to the agency. The FCC did not explicitly call out China, but Beijing was quick to take the ban personally. That’s probably because Chinese companies dominate the robotics industry. Sorry, Tesla Optimus Interact Analysis has found Chinese companies make up 90% of global android shipments. More than 13,000 humanoid robots were shipped last year, and of that, China’s top two robot-makers, Agibot and Unitree, shipped more than 5,000 each, Omdia found. US competitors including Figure AI and Tesla shipped at most ...

  In an earnings call key to soothing skittish investors, the world’s biggest company by revenue arrived with its head in the clouds. And that was just fine by Wall Street. Shares of Amazon jumped as much as 9% in after-hours trading Thursday after second-quarter earnings results that included rip-roaring cloud revenue, demonstrating the world still can’t get enough compute. Investors took it as a sign that generating a return on enormous artificial intelligence investments is possible, which is more than can be said about some fellow hyperscalers. Tipping of the Hyperscales Jittery investors are finally starting to get an idea of what they do and do not like to see from Big Tech hyperscalers. Meta plummeted nearly 8% on Thursday following its after-the-bell earnings call the day before, in which executives increased the lower end of its capex forecast even as AI spending was already eating into its free cash flow. Microsoft, on the other hand, had its best trading day since 2008 ...