| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What's said | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INTC | Intel | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +25% Y/Y to $16.1B ($1.7B beat), non-GAAP EPS $0.42 ($0.20 beat) vs a $0.10 loss a year ago — CEO Lip-Bu Tan called it the strongest revenue growth in more than fifteen years. A $10.8B paper loss came from Intel's own share price making the free shares promised to the US government far more expensive. INTC has nearly tripled this year but sits ~30% below its June 22 high, caught in a sector-wide rotation out of chip stocks as Wall Street questions AI-hardware spending. Data Center & AI +59% to $6.3B (agentic workloads pulling the stack back toward CPUs); Client Computing +13% to $8.9B (vs $8.0B consensus) with AI PCs two-thirds of the mix; Foundry +31% to $5.8B (accelerating from 16%), adj gross margin 41.8% (~280 bps above guide). CFO Dave Zinsner: rising memory prices will hit PCs, and management expects sub-seasonal 2H PC consumption — yet 2026 CapEx is raised from $18B to >$20B, with 2027 significantly higher. Foundry growth is still almost entirely internal (no external customers named; "early next year" for visible progress). Q3 guide $15.8–16.8B (midpoint ~$1.2B above consensus), EPS $0.38 (vs ~$0.27), GM 42%; 18A yields ahead of plan, 14A to volume in 2028. Watch Client Computing in Q3 as memory costs hit PC pricing. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| GEV | GE Vernova | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +22% Y/Y to $11.1B ($330M beat), but EPS $2.47 missed by $0.71 and adj EBITDA $1.25B came in under the $1.28B consensus. Margin band left untouched at 12%–14% while announcing gas-turbine capacity going to 30 GW/yr by 2030 (from ~20 GW) — capacity that arrives years from now. Demand supports the bet today: orders $24.2B (+88% organic, book-to-bill >2x), backlog $176B (+$13B sequentially, nearly half slated for 2029 or later). Power +14% to $5.5B; gas GW under contract 100 → 116 in one quarter, CEO Scott Strazik expects at least 125 GW by year-end. Wind's EBITDA loss widened to $275M (from $165M) on revenue −10%, with ~$400M of full-year losses guided and no called inflection in US orders. Electrification +68% to $3.6B on $2.7B of data-center orders. FY26 FCF guide nearly doubled to $11.5–12.5B (from $6.5–7.5B) — but ~$10B was already booked in 1H, leaving $1.5–2.5B for the whole second half, and Q2 leaned on a $6.4B working-capital benefit from customers prepaying production slots that won't repeat. FY26 revenue guide raised to $45.5–46.5B (vs ~$45.4B consensus), the second raise this year. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| TXN | Texas Instruments | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +23% Y/Y to a record $5.5B ($220M beat, +13% sequentially), EPS $2.14 ($0.20 beat) — yet shares fell ~4% after a 70% rally this year, tracking the semiconductor ETF almost perfectly. Analog +26% to $4.4B, Embedded +16% to $788M; industrial ~+30%, data center doubled, and automotive finally inflected to mid-teens growth after two flat quarters (China EVs/hybrids, customer inventories run down to almost nothing). Gross margin 61% and operating margin 42% (from 35%) — on volume and utilization alone. Three caveats: pricing hasn't contributed yet (customer-by-customer increases started, mostly Analog; CEO Haviv Ilan calls the Q3 contribution "almost insignificant," step-up expected in Q4); personal electronics is the soft spot as component shortages squeeze TI's own customers (below-seasonal sequential growth expected); and trailing FCF of $6.5B (+55%) included $1.6B of CHIPS Act money — CFO Rafael Lizardi warned ITC payments are choppy and non-US assembly/test CapEx doesn't qualify. Q3 guide $5.65–6.15B (vs ~$5.6B) and EPS $2.23–2.57 (vs ~$2.18) implies a ninth straight above-seasonal quarter; FY26 CapEx $2–3B (likely high end) vs $4.55B last year. Julie Knecht takes over as CFO Aug 1. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| AXP | American Express | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +10% Y/Y to $19.6B ($60M miss), EPS +11% to $4.53 ($0.13 beat) — a small miss, but the stock dropped on deceleration signals: network volume growth 11% → 9%, billed business 10% → 9%, new card acquisitions 3.0M vs 3.1M in both Q1 and a year ago. The premium engine still works: net card fees +15% to $2.9B with the refreshed Platinum portfolio the fastest-growing US consumer line; card-member spending +9% FX-adjusted (best in three years), restaurants +10%, travel bookings +22%; 65% of new consumer accounts from Millennials and Gen Z. The revenue miss traces to net interest income of $4.7B slipping sequentially even as card balances grew to $218.1B; consolidated expenses +12% to $14.5B (Platinum refresh costs, heavier benefit usage) outpaced revenue; provisions fell to $1.1B from $1.4B but net write-offs were higher. FY26 revenue-growth guide raised to 10% (from 9%–10%, ≈$79.5B, exactly on consensus); EPS held at $17.30–$17.90 (vs $17.69) as CEO Stephen Squeri reinvests into technology, acquisition costs and the proposed TheFork purchase (a European booking platform adding 50,000 restaurants). Card-fee growth guided to accelerate into the high teens in 2H — it ran 15% this quarter, so that's the Q3 number to check. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| TMUS | T-Mobile US | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +8% Y/Y to $22.8B ($150M miss), GAAP EPS +5% to $2.99 ($0.39 beat) — the first quarter in a while where guidance didn't rise across the board, with the only raises in cash flow and driven by lower cash income taxes rather than operations. The metric CEO Srini Gopalan inaugurated last quarter is decelerating: postpaid net account adds of 277,000 fell 13% Y/Y (still clearing the ~272K estimate) and ARPA grew just 2% to $153, down from 4% in Q1 — which matters because ARPA was the whole argument for retiring postpaid phone net adds. Postpaid service revenue still +13% to $15.9B and core adj EBITDA +12% to $9.5B, both industry-leading. Shares fell 10% after the print: CFO Peter Osvaldik guided Q3 to ~250K account adds (below Q2) and warned that retiring legacy rate plans will temporarily elevate account churn — while AT&T reported 432,000 postpaid phone net adds two days earlier (T-Mobile stopped publishing that figure in Q1, so there's no direct comparison). Adj FCF guide nudged to $18.4–18.8B and operating cash flow to $28.4–28.8B; postpaid net accounts reiterated at 950K–1.05M, core adj EBITDA $37.1–37.5B, ~$10B capex, ARPA growth now at the high end of 2.5%–3%. After 494K in 1H and ~250K guided for Q3, T-Mobile needs 200–300K in Q4 to land inside its own range with churn elevated by its own pricing changes. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| IBM | International Business Machines | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +1% Y/Y to $17.2B ($60M miss), adj EPS $2.93 roughly in line — the print barely moved the stock because the damage was already done. IBM preannounced on July 14, only the second time in company history (after 2008), and shares fell 25% in a day: the worst single session it has ever had, ~$70B of market value; the stock closed down 31% YTD and at its lowest since November 2024. The mainframe is the whole story — IBM Z revenue fell 42% after surging 51% in Q1, pulling Infrastructure down 7% to $3.8B. CEO Arvind Krishna's explanation: clients abruptly redirected budget toward servers, storage and memory to lock in AI infrastructure ahead of expected price increases, and IBM misjudged the magnitude. Software +5% to $7.8B (missed ~$8.0B), Consulting flat at $5.3B. The defense rests on timing not demand — tens of large deals slipped rather than died, roughly a third already closed in Q3, and Krishna says there's no evidence of clients leaving the mainframe. FCF guidance held at ~$1B of Y/Y growth, protected by cuts to third-party tech spend, supply chain and admin, headcount flat. Starbucks is replacing vendor software incl. IBM's (CFO James Kavanaugh: ~$2M/yr exposed). FY26 cc revenue growth cut to 4%–5% (from >5%), software 6%–8% — Evercore called it "better than feared." >$10B committed to quantum over five years; acquiring HRL Laboratories (the Boeing/GM research venture) by end of Q3. Watch Infrastructure in Q3 for whether the remaining two-thirds of slipped deals close. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| VZ | Verizon Communications | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue −1% Y/Y to $34.3B ($860M miss) while adj EPS rose 7% to $1.30 ($0.03 beat); shares are up more than 10% this year while AT&T and T-Mobile are both down. The miss was largely deliberate: CEO Dan Schulman pulled back on device subsidies, so equipment revenue dropped nearly 20% (>$1.2B) as upgrade volumes fell 27%. Mobility and broadband service revenue grew 3% to $23.4B across Consumer and Business, landing inside the 2%–3% range that was Q1's open question. Subscriber gains came with less spending behind them — 184,000 postpaid phone net adds (best consumer Q2 in five years) with consumer postpaid phone churn at 84 bps, and 348,000 broadband net adds (193K fixed wireless, 155K fiber), pushing 1H mobility+broadband additions above 1 million, more than double last year. Adj EBITDA +7% to a record $13.7B at a 40% margin; FCF +24% to $6.4B. ~3,000 jobs cut and hundreds of retail stores handed to franchisees; CFO Anthony Skiadas said promo amortization has peaked but eases only gradually. Guidance rose a second straight quarter (service revenue growth 2.5%–3%, adj EPS $4.99–$5.04). But most of the work is ahead: 239K postpaid phone net adds through two quarters against a full-year guide of 875K–1M, so 2H must deliver roughly three times 1H. Schulman disclosed a $1B+ dark-fiber deal with Google for data-center connectivity (more expected by year-end) but put meaningful AI-infrastructure revenue in 2027; his contract was extended through 2028. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| SCHW | Charles Schwab | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 net revenue +21% Y/Y to $7.1B ($0.2B beat) and adj EPS +42% to $1.62 ($0.07 beat); expenses $3.40B vs a $3.38B consensus, with the expense outlook raised alongside revenue. The market is treating a volatility-fuelled quarter as cyclical earnings it won't pay a higher multiple for. Clients traded relentlessly: record 12 million daily average trades (+57% Y/Y) pushed trading revenue to $1.2B (+28%); Wurster said volume runs 3.5x heavier on down days, with clients making smaller, more frequent buys rather than big directional bets, and June's SpaceX IPO produced one of the busiest days in the firm's 55-year history. Inflows were just as strong but leaned on borrowing — core net new assets +49% to $119.8B (record June haul of $62.7B despite tax-season outflows), total client assets +22% to $13.08 trillion, 1.4 million new brokerage accounts, and margin loan balances up 30% in a single quarter to $165.1B (clients borrowing from Schwab to buy more stock, which earns Schwab interest but unwinds fast when markets drop). FY26 revenue-growth guide lifted to 17.5%–18.5% (from 14%–15%) and expense growth to 9.5%–10.5% (from 8.5%–9.5%), ~300 bps of the latter tied directly to trading volumes; adj pretax margin 54.3% vs 50.1% a year ago. Q3 shows whether the margin gains survive cooler volumes. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| T | AT&T | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +2% Y/Y to $31.6B ($250M miss) while adj EPS surged 20% to $0.65 ($0.06 beat) — the shortfall didn't matter because the subscriber numbers landed. After months of SpaceX-entering-wireless fear, AT&T posted 432,000 postpaid phone net adds against ~325,000 expected, with churn at 0.86%. Over 1 million Advanced Connectivity customers added, including 646,000 internet net adds (367K fiber, 279K fixed wireless); Advanced Connectivity service revenue +5% to $23.5B (accelerating 150 bps from Q1) and segment operating income +20% to $7.3B. FCF of $4.7B cleared the high end of the $4.0–4.5B guide. The cost of winning on volume shows elsewhere: fiber ARPU fell 1% Y/Y on a full quarter of Lumen and CFO Pascal Desroches warned convergence discounts will keep pressuring it, while legacy service revenue dropped 26% and legacy EBITDA fell 46% as the copper shutdown accelerates. Guidance held across the board (adj EPS $2.25–$2.35, FCF >$18B, EBITDA growth 3%–4%); what moved was capital return — the 2026 buyback raised to ~$10B from $8B, which CEO John Stankey tied directly to the stock being undervalued. Q3 FCF guided roughly flat Y/Y with growth backloaded into Q4. Fiber ARPU is the Q3 item to watch: if it's still falling after Lumen laps, AT&T is buying subscribers with price cuts. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| LMT | Lockheed Martin | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +11% Y/Y to $20.1B ($730M beat) and GAAP EPS $7.94 ($0.74 beat); shares jumped 11% after falling roughly 22% since fighting began in Iran, on fears defense budgets peak once a Democratic House arrives after the midterms. The order book was the real headline: $65B of new orders for a 3.2:1 book-to-bill, lifting backlog to a record $230B from $186B just one quarter ago, driven mostly by the multi-year THAAD interceptor award tied to a preliminary $35B Pentagon commitment. All four segments grew, led by Missiles and Fire Control +19% on THAAD, PAC-3 and Precision Strike. Free cash flow swung to $2.9B from −$150M a year ago, erasing Q1's burn — but the increase came from lower CapEx, not operations: cash from operations guidance held at $9.2–9.4B while CapEx guidance dropped ~$450M, precisely the amount FCF went up. That CapEx cut sits oddly beside the story of building ahead of orders (new munitions plants in Troy and Courtland, Alabama meant to hold surge capacity before contracts land). FY26 guidance rose across every line: sales $79.75–81.75B (vs $79.1B), EPS $29.95–30.65 (vs ~$29.90), segment operating profit $8.5–8.7B, FCF $7.0–7.2B. Also agreed to buy Ultra Maritime (undersea sensing) and signed an MOU with Rheinmetall to produce ATACMS in Europe. With orders running better than three times deliveries, demand stopped being the constraint — watch whether back-half revenue actually accelerates or the backlog just keeps swelling. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| NOW | ServiceNow | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Author disclosure: he owns NOW in the App Economy Portfolio (ratings shared only with members). Q2 revenue +24% Y/Y to $4.0B ($50M beat) and adj EPS +10% to $0.90 ($0.04 beat), yet the stock is still down more than 3% YTD — nobody disputes the growth, but the market is discounting the durability of seat-based revenue in a world where agents handle the tickets that used to require licensed humans. The quarter gave that thesis little to work with: cRPO +21% to $13.2B against $29B total RPO, 123 deals above $1M in net-new ACV (+~40% Y/Y), AI ACV crossed $1B (tracking to the $1.5B year-end target), agentic deployments up ninefold in nine months, renewal rate held at 98%, and federal demand pulled some on-premise subscription revenue forward. Three things keep the market skeptical: Q3 subscription guidance of $3.975–3.980B came in below the ~$4.01B consensus (a rare miss after five straight beats); the pricing model is mid-transition, with hybrid seat-plus-consumption billing diluting gross margin (full-year adj gross margin guide ticked lower even as adj operating margin held at 31.5%); and the M&A is costly — the $7.75B Armis acquisition closed in April is polluting margins, with the $4B short-term loan funding it adding interest expense and maturing in October (drag continues into Q3). FY26 subscription guide raised to $15.76–15.78B (vs ~$15.75B), a narrow bottom-end raise. McDermott pitches ServiceNow as the "AI Control Tower"; the 98% renewal rate is the number that doesn't fit the bear case. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| MCO | Moody's | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +15% Y/Y to $2.2B ($110M beat) and adj EPS +31% to $4.68 ($0.43 beat), with adj operating margin expanding 440 bps to 55% — yet management trimmed full-year operating margin guidance to 44%–45% (from ~45%) and framed the quarter as timing, not acceleration: CFO Noémie Heuland said a record June pulled issuance forward, leaving Moody's "right where we thought we were going to be." MIS did the heavy lifting: transaction revenue +34%, more than $2 trillion of debt rated for the second straight quarter, segment adj operating margin 68%. Moody's Analytics grew 8% organic cc (4% reported), ARR +9% to ~$3.7B with 95% retention and recurring revenue now 99% of MA; CEO Rob Fauber cautioned against extrapolating any acceleration and reiterated high-single-digit ARR growth. The caveats all point one way — mix is getting thinner (big investment-grade deals from frequent issuers carry lower yields, so rated volume growth doesn't convert one-for-one into revenue), and management raised its issuance outlook to mid-single-digit growth while leaving MIS revenue guidance unchanged: about as clear a statement as you'll get that volume and revenue have decoupled. Second-half comps tighten after the June pull-forward and Heuland warned the trajectory "may not be linear." Guidance narrowed to adj EPS $16.50–$17.00 (midpoint $16.75 vs $16.78 consensus), revenue growth still high single digits, FCF guide up ~$100M to $2.7–2.9B, restructuring extended through 2027 for $300–350M of annualized savings. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| GM | General Motors | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +2% Y/Y to $48.0B ($0.9B beat) and adj EPS $3.57 ($0.39 beat), with adj EBIT margin widening 0.3 points to 8.2% even as first-half deliveries fell 7%; shares closed up 5% as investors focused on the guidance raise. Full-size pickups carried it — GM held more than 42% of the US full-size pickup market through 1H and gained share Y/Y, with dealer inventory kept tight at 511,000 units (~55 days of supply). Warranty relief was worth about $500M in 1H, and CFO Paul Jacobson raised that full-year tailwind from $1B to $1–1.5B. Software and services keep compounding quietly: 1 million new Super Cruise/OnStar subscriptions expected this year and deferred revenue of $6.3B heading toward $7.5B. GM continued unwinding its EV buildout with $2.3B in EV charges (total $10.9B since mid-2025; Jacobson says the material cash charges are substantially complete), so GAAP net income guidance was cut again to $8.4–9.8B. FY26 adj EBIT raised to $14–16B (vs $14.8B consensus) and adj EPS to $12–14 (vs ~$12.8), the second raise this year; Q4 will run below normal seasonality with ~35,000 fewer units Y/Y and higher launch costs. $2B of stock bought back, share count now below 900 million (from 960 million a year ago). North America margin is the number to watch — Q2 hit 8.6%, helped by tight inventory and a warranty tailwind that won't repeat at this size. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| DPZ | Domino's Pizza | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Q2 revenue +4% Y/Y to $1.2B ($10M beat) while GAAP EPS fell 1% to $4.07 ($0.10 miss); the stock is still down roughly 23% YTD. US same-store sales grew just 0.1% — the weakest in five quarters and short of the ~0.6% consensus — but the miss was ticket, not traffic: order counts rose meaningfully across both delivery and carryout, offset by a lower average check that management pinned on lapping Stuffed Crust and a premium series that, in CEO Russel Weiner's words, "missed on this one." He called the ticket drag "largely within our control," and management sees a messaging/mix problem rather than a demand problem — the more fixable of the two. Domino's now claims the #1 pizza spot on both Uber and DoorDash and insists its scale lead is the widest it's ever been. International comps slipped 0.1% ex-FX, with Domino's Pizza Enterprises still the drag as it sheds lower-margin transactions. The full-year outlook was held intact: US and international comps up low single digits (vs ~1.3% and ~1.0% consensus), global retail sales up mid-single digits, operating income up mid-to-high single digits. A new product Weiner called "unlike anything we've offered before" lands this quarter, aimed at what customers buy when they don't buy pizza. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| AAL | American Airlines Group | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Record revenue of $16.7B (+16% Y/Y, $50M beat) and adj EPS of $0.15 ($0.10 beat) but down from $0.95 a year ago; shares fell as much as 9%, the worst day in a year, with the stock down 24% this month. CFO Devon May said American was tracking toward roughly $1.5B in FY26 pretax profit three weeks ago — fuel expectations for the back half have jumped almost $1.6B since. The premium build is working: premium unit revenue +13%, managed corporate revenue +26% for a fifth straight quarter, record AAdvantage enrollment on the new Citi co-brand, and nearly 60% of revenue from households earning $150,000 or more; American offset almost half of a $2.2B fuel increase through fares, holding non-fuel unit costs under 3% while total unit costs rose 17%. Working against it: fuel costs spiked 83% Y/Y with crude above $100 and the full-year headwind approaches $6B, while Q3 capacity growth was trimmed by about two points to 3%–5%, capping the revenue that offsets fuel. FY26 guidance dropped to a loss of $0.65 to a profit of $0.65 (vs ~$0.60 profit consensus), the second cut in three months — in contrast, Delta reaffirmed and United guided up. CEO Robert Isom has rebuffed United's merger overtures, betting premium and loyalty can close the gap with Delta and United on its own, but every fuel-driven cut makes that case harder to argue. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
| AMC | AMC Entertainment | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The best quarter in AMC's 106-year history: revenue +14% Y/Y to $1.6B ($100M beat) and adj EBITDA +70% to a record $321M, cracking $300M in a quarter for the first time; shares soared about 27% after the print and, for once, the move was based on fundamentals rather than memes. Attendance rose 14% against a domestic box office of $3.0B — the biggest quarter in seven years, thanks to Toy Story 5 and The Super Mario Galaxy Movie — but the main story was operating leverage: AMC's domestic revenue rose 13% versus the industry's 11%, roughly 66% of incremental revenue flowed through to EBITDA, and the adjusted margin lifted 0.7 points to 20%. Europe was the standout with EBITDA +337% to $36M on an 18% attendance gain; premium formats did the heavy lifting. Management pressed the advantage on the balance sheet — refinancing $400M of 2027 debt, converting $156M of 2030 notes into equity, and clearing meaningful maturities until 2029. Two watch items: cost discipline may not hold (CEO Adam Aron cautioned he doesn't expect the same expense containment going forward, and a $6M insurance credit flattered G&A), and free cash flow still hinges on the slate — AMC needs roughly $10B in annual domestic box office to stay FCF-positive over twelve months and isn't there yet. 2026 net CapEx raised to $200–235M (from $175–225M) mostly for premium auditoriums, with a new ~3x leverage target; The Odyssey's record $124M domestic opening lands in Q3 and "Dunesday" (Dune Part Three + Avengers: Doomsday, same date) arrives December 18. (Recap, not a stance call.) | article ↗ |
"View" here is referenced/neutral — App Economy Insights is financial-analysis journalism; this is a sixteen-company earnings recap, not a set of buy/sell calls (BUY/SELL/HOLD ratings are shared only with App Economy Portfolio members; the author's only disclosed holding among these names is NOW). Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis. The "Source" links open the newsletter (no per-name timestamps — it's a written post). Companies named only in passing inside a section (Starbucks, Delta, United, Google, Rheinmetall, Uber, DoorDash, SpaceX, Boeing, Citi, Ultra Maritime, HRL, Armis, TheFork) are not given rows.
A jargon-free summary of the read behind each recap. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
Intel designs and manufactures computer chips. This was its best growth quarter in more than fifteen years — sales up 25%, and a real profit where a year ago there was a loss. The eye-catching "$10.8 billion loss" on the statement isn't a business problem at all: Intel promised the US government free shares as part of its deal, and because Intel's own stock price rocketed this year, those promised shares became far more expensive to hand over. Accounting rules force it to book that as a loss.
The odd part is the stock. It has nearly tripled this year yet trades about 30% below its June high, because investors have been dumping chip stocks generally while they argue about whether the giant AI hardware spending spree can last. Inside the business, the AI/data-centre unit grew 59% — agentic AI workloads apparently lean back on ordinary processors, Intel's home turf — and its contract-manufacturing arm ("Foundry") grew 31%. The catch: Foundry is essentially selling to Intel itself; the CEO still wouldn't name a single outside customer, and says look again early next year. Meanwhile memory chips are getting expensive, which will raise PC prices later this year, and Intel is raising its own spending anyway (over $20 billion this year, more in 2027). Next quarter's tell is the PC unit. A recap, not a recommendation.
GE Vernova builds the equipment that generates and moves electricity — gas turbines, wind turbines, grid gear. Demand is extraordinary right now because data centres need power: orders came in at $24.2 billion, more than twice what the company delivered in the quarter (a "book-to-bill above 2x" simply means orders arrived twice as fast as work was completed), and the order backlog hit $176 billion, nearly half of it for 2029 or later. So management is committing to expand gas-turbine output by half — to 30 gigawatts a year by 2030.
Two cautions. Wind is still losing money (a widening $275 million quarterly loss, with no turnaround called). And the headline that cash flow guidance nearly doubled needs a footnote: about $10 billion of the promised $11.5–12.5 billion has already been collected in the first half, much of it because customers prepaid to reserve production slots. That's a one-time boost to the bank balance, not a repeatable stream — which leaves only $1.5–2.5 billion expected across the entire second half. A recap, not a call.
Texas Instruments makes the unglamorous analog and embedded chips that sit inside cars, factory machines, appliances and phones. It just posted a record quarter — sales up 23%, profit margins up sharply — and the interesting detail is how: purely by selling more and running its factories fuller. It hasn't yet raised prices. Management has only started customer-by-customer increases and says the effect this quarter is "almost insignificant," with a real step-up expected later in the year. In other words, there's an untouched profit lever still sitting there. Cars, in particular, finally turned back up after two flat quarters, led by Chinese EVs where customers had run their parts inventories down to nothing.
Two things to keep honest. Consumer electronics is weak, partly because TI's own customers can't get all the components they need. And the reported free cash flow of $6.5 billion flatters reality — $1.6 billion of it was US government CHIPS Act money, which is lumpy and doesn't apply to plants outside America. The stock fell about 4% despite the beat, simply because it had already run up 70% this year alongside the whole chip sector. A recap, not a call.
American Express both issues premium credit cards and runs its own payments network, so it earns from annual card fees, from a slice of what members spend, and from interest on balances. The premium engine is clearly working: annual card fees grew 15%, the newly refreshed Platinum card is the fastest-growing product in its US consumer business, spending grew at the best rate in three years, and 65% of new consumer accounts came from Millennials and Gen Z — the generational handover Amex has been engineering for years.
What spooked investors was the direction of travel rather than the level. Every growth rate ticked down a notch — spending volume from 11% to 9%, new cards slightly fewer than last year — and revenue came in a touch light because interest income slipped even as balances grew. Costs rose faster than revenue, largely from the Platinum relaunch and members actually using the perks. Management says the shortfall is temporary, nudged full-year revenue growth up to 10%, and is spending the upside on technology and on buying TheFork, a European restaurant-booking site that adds 50,000 restaurants to its dining perks. The specific promise to check next quarter: card fees accelerating from 15% into the high teens. A recap, not a call.
T-Mobile is one of the three big US wireless carriers. Last quarter it changed the scoreboard: instead of reporting how many new phone lines it added (the industry's traditional yardstick), it started highlighting how many new accounts — households — it signs up and how much revenue each account generates ("ARPA"). The argument was that revenue per household is the better measure. The problem this quarter is that both new numbers slowed: accounts down 13% versus a year ago, and revenue per account growing just 2% instead of 4%.
The underlying business is still strong — service revenue up 13%, profits up 12%, both best-in-industry — but the stock fell 10% for two reasons. Management guided next quarter lower and warned that phasing out old price plans will push more customers to cancel temporarily. And AT&T had reported 432,000 new phone lines two days earlier, a number T-Mobile no longer publishes, so investors couldn't check it head-to-head. Doing the arithmetic on its own full-year target, T-Mobile now needs a strong fourth quarter to land inside its own range while its pricing changes are still driving churn. A recap, not a call.
The quarter itself was unremarkable; the story is what happened eleven days earlier. On July 14, IBM warned the market its results would fall short — only the second such pre-announcement in the company's history, the last one in 2008 — and the stock lost a quarter of its value in a single day, about $70 billion. The cause was one product line: IBM Z, the mainframe. Mainframes are the giant, extremely reliable computers that still run banks' and airlines' core transaction systems, and they sell in lumpy multi-million-dollar deals. That line fell 42% after growing 51% just three months earlier.
IBM's explanation is that customers suddenly diverted their IT budgets into servers, storage and memory to lock in AI hardware before prices rise — so the mainframe money wasn't cancelled, it was postponed. The CEO says there's no sign customers are abandoning mainframes, and roughly a third of the deals that slipped have already closed this quarter. Whether the other two-thirds close is the whole question. Elsewhere, software grew but missed, consulting was flat, IBM protected its cash flow forecast by cutting costs, and it committed over $10 billion to quantum computing. A recap, not a call.
Verizon deliberately missed on revenue. Carriers normally buy customers by subsidising phone handsets — you get a "free" iPhone, they book the phone's price as revenue but eat the discount. New CEO Dan Schulman cut those subsidies, so upgrade volumes fell 27% and equipment revenue dropped by over $1.2 billion. That's the entire revenue shortfall, and it's the point: profit went up, cash flow rose 24%, and margins hit a record.
Remarkably, customers came anyway — the best consumer second quarter for new phone lines in five years, plus 348,000 new home-broadband customers. Verizon is also cutting about 3,000 jobs and handing hundreds of its stores to franchisees, and it raised its forecasts for a second straight quarter, which is why the stock is up over 10% this year while AT&T and T-Mobile are down. The catch is arithmetic: it has signed only 239,000 new phone lines so far this year against a full-year target of 875,000 to 1 million, so the back half has to deliver roughly three times the front half. There's also a new $1 billion-plus deal to lease fibre to Google for connecting data centres — real, but the money mostly arrives in 2027. A recap, not a call.
Schwab is the brokerage where millions of Americans hold their investment accounts. It earns from trading activity, from interest on client cash, and from lending clients money to buy more stock ("margin loans"). Volatile markets are good for all three, and this quarter was extraordinary: a record 12 million trades a day, up 57%; nearly $120 billion of new client money; total client assets of $13.08 trillion. June's SpaceX IPO caused one of the busiest days in the firm's 55-year history.
Two things temper it. First, margin loans jumped 30% in a single quarter to $165 billion — that is clients borrowing to buy more shares, which is lucrative for Schwab on the way up and unwinds violently when markets fall. Second, the market clearly views these earnings as a temporary product of volatility rather than a new baseline, which is why it won't pay a higher multiple for them even after a 42% jump in profit. Schwab raised its revenue forecast sharply, but also its expense forecast — a chunk of which is directly tied to trading volumes that may not persist. The next quarter shows whether the fatter margins survive calmer markets. A recap, not a call.
For months investors worried that SpaceX's satellite service would start stealing mobile customers. AT&T's answer was 432,000 new phone lines against roughly 325,000 expected, plus over a million new internet customers — a decisive volume quarter that made a small revenue miss irrelevant. Profit per share jumped 20%, cash flow beat its own guidance, and management raised the amount of stock it plans to buy back this year to about $10 billion from $8 billion, with the CEO saying plainly that he thinks the shares are undervalued.
The number the article flags as the real test is fibre ARPU — the average monthly revenue per fibre-internet customer — which fell 1%. AT&T has been bundling mobile and internet together at a discount to win households, and the finance chief admitted those bundle discounts will keep pressuring it. If that figure is still falling next quarter, once the acquired Lumen business stops distorting the comparison, it means AT&T is essentially buying its subscriber growth with price cuts rather than winning it. Meanwhile the old copper-phone business keeps shrinking fast, which is planned. A recap, not a call.
Lockheed makes fighter jets and, increasingly, missiles and missile-defence systems. The quarter's headline isn't sales, it's orders: $65 billion of new contracts against about $20 billion of work delivered — orders arriving more than three times faster than the factories can ship. That pushed its order backlog to a record $230 billion, up from $186 billion just three months earlier, driven mainly by a huge multi-year award for THAAD interceptors tied to a preliminary $35 billion Pentagon commitment. The stock jumped 11%, having sold off about 22% since the Iran fighting started on fears that defence budgets peak after the midterms.
One thing to read carefully. Free cash flow swung from negative to $2.9 billion, and the full-year forecast went up — but the increase came entirely from spending less on new plant and equipment, not from the business generating more cash. Management cut its capital-spending plan by about $450 million, which is precisely the amount the cash forecast rose. That's a slightly awkward fit with the story it tells about building munitions plants ahead of demand. With demand no longer the constraint, the thing to watch is whether revenue actually accelerates or the backlog simply keeps growing because the factories can't keep up. A recap, not a call.
ServiceNow sells the software big companies use to run their internal workflows — IT help desks, HR requests, customer service — and it charges per user, per year. That pricing model is exactly why the stock is down this year despite 24% growth: if AI agents end up handling the support tickets that used to require a human with a licence, the number of licences could shrink. It's a bet against the business model, not against the current numbers.
This quarter offered the bears little. Contracted revenue for the next twelve months grew 21%, million-dollar deals were up nearly 40%, AI-related contract value crossed $1 billion, and — the most telling figure — 98% of customers renewed. Against that: next quarter's revenue guidance came in slightly below expectations (rare here), the shift to a hybrid "per-seat plus per-use" pricing model is squeezing gross margin during the transition, and April's $7.75 billion Armis acquisition (funded with a $4 billion short-term loan due in October) is weighing on profitability. The CEO's pitch is that ServiceNow becomes the "control tower" governing all those AI agents. Note: the newsletter's author owns this stock in his App Economy Portfolio. A recap, not a call.
Moody's has two halves. The famous one rates bonds — companies pay a fee each time they borrow — so its revenue rises and falls with how much debt is being issued. The other half sells subscription data and risk analytics, which is steadier. Both did well: revenue up 15%, profit up 31%, margins sharply higher, with more than $2 trillion of debt rated for the second quarter running.
Management, unusually, talked the quarter down. A record June simply pulled borrowing forward from later in the year, so this isn't a new faster run rate. And there's a subtler point worth remembering: the mix is thinning. Large, frequent, high-quality borrowers pay lower fees per dollar of debt rated, so more volume doesn't mean proportionally more revenue. The clearest evidence is that management raised its forecast for how much debt will be issued but left its forecast for ratings revenue unchanged — volume and revenue have come apart. Full-year margin guidance was actually trimmed. A recap, not a call.
GM sold fewer vehicles — first-half deliveries fell 7% — and made more money anyway, raising its profit forecast for the second time this year. The reason is mix and discipline: full-size pickup trucks, its most profitable product, held over 42% of the US market and gained share, while GM kept dealer inventories deliberately tight (about 55 days' supply) so it doesn't have to discount. A quieter helper was warranty costs coming in lower than budgeted, worth roughly $500 million in the first half — real money, but not something that repeats at that size.
Two other threads. Software and subscriptions (Super Cruise hands-free driving, OnStar) keep compounding in the background, with a million new subscriptions expected this year. And GM keeps writing down its electric-vehicle build-out — another $2.3 billion this quarter, $10.9 billion since mid-2025 — which is why its official accounting profit forecast keeps falling even as its operating forecast rises; management says the cash portion of that cleanup is now essentially finished. The number to watch next quarter is the North American profit margin (8.6%), because both the tight inventory and the warranty windfall flattered it. A recap, not a call.
Domino's US sales at established stores grew just 0.1% — its weakest showing in five quarters. But why matters enormously in restaurants. Sales at a store move for two reasons: more customers walking in (traffic), or each customer spending more (ticket). Here, order counts actually rose across both delivery and carryout; what fell was the average order size. Management blamed lapping last year's Stuffed Crust launch and a premium menu series the CEO admitted they "missed on."
That distinction is the whole read. Losing customers to competitors or to a weak economy is a hard problem; customers still showing up but buying cheaper items is a menu-and-marketing problem, which a company can fix with the next launch. Domino's says it's now the top pizza brand on both Uber Eats and DoorDash and that its scale advantage is the widest it has ever been, and it left its full-year outlook untouched — a signal of confidence. A new product the CEO calls "unlike anything we've offered before," aimed at what people order when they don't want pizza, arrives this quarter. A recap, not a call.
American Airlines flew more people and charged more than ever — record revenue, up 16% — and still barely made money, because jet fuel costs 83% more than a year ago with crude oil above $100 a barrel. The scale of it: the full-year fuel headwind approaches $6 billion, and in just three weeks the outlook for second-half fuel worsened by $1.6 billion, wiping out what the finance chief had been describing as roughly $1.5 billion of expected annual pre-tax profit. The company cut its full-year forecast for the second time in three months, to somewhere between a small loss and a small profit.
The strategy underneath is actually working. American has been shifting toward the profitable end of flying — premium cabin revenue up 13%, corporate travel up 26% for the fifth straight quarter, record credit-card loyalty sign-ups, and nearly 60% of revenue now from households earning $150,000 or more — and it recovered almost half the fuel increase through higher fares. But Delta reaffirmed its outlook and United raised theirs, so American is visibly the weakest of the three. Its CEO has turned down merger approaches from United, arguing it can close the gap alone; each fuel-driven downgrade makes that harder to argue. A recap, not a call.
AMC, the cinema chain famous as a meme stock, just had the best quarter in its 106-year history — and this time the move was earned. Revenue rose 14%, but profit (adjusted EBITDA) jumped 70% to a record $321 million. That gap is "operating leverage": a cinema's costs are mostly fixed — the building, the staff, the projector — so once the seats start filling, roughly two-thirds of each extra dollar of revenue drops straight to profit. Attendance rose 14% on a strong slate (Toy Story 5, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie), and AMC grew faster than the industry because more of its customers paid up for premium large-format screens. Europe was the standout.
Management used the moment to fix the balance sheet, refinancing and converting debt so there's nothing significant to repay until 2029. Two honest caveats from the company itself: the CEO says the same tight cost control won't continue (and a $6 million insurance credit flattered this quarter's overheads), and AMC still needs roughly $10 billion of annual US box office to generate positive free cash flow over a year — it isn't there yet. So the cash story remains hostage to which films Hollywood releases. Next up: The Odyssey's record $124 million opening, and "Dunesday" on December 18 when Dune Part Three and Avengers: Doomsday share a release date. A recap, not a call.
Key points & figures extracted from the App Economy Insights PRO newsletter (in transcript.txt) for personal study. Not investment advice. © App Economy Insights for source material.