Monday Takeaways: Elections, Earnings, and Interest Rates

Shah Gilani|November 4, 2024

Buckle up…

This could be one of the craziest market weeks we’ve seen in a long, long time.

And it all started last week.

Even with Tesla, Google, and Amazon crushing their earnings, the S&P and Nasdaq both dropped about 1.5% last week.

This week?

With the election… 20% of the S&P 500 dropping earnings… and the Fed’s rate decision… we’re looking at a wild week.

In today’s takeaways, I’m diving into everything from AI spending concerns and big earnings reports to Iran and oil prices…

Plus, I’m revealing a brand-new project to help you double your money in 60 days.

See what’s going on in your Monday Takeaways, your inside track on what’s moving your money… NOW.

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Transcript

60-Day Double Your Money Challenge

Hey, everybody. Shah Gilani with your Monday takeaways.

It’s going to be an interesting week. I’m being mild because it’s actually going to be wild.

But I’m going to start with takeaways from last week. Tech earnings were pretty darn good for the most part. Of course, there were a couple of misses, but some of the big names posted fabulous results and saw their stocks jump.

So we saw Tesla jump. We saw Google jump. We saw Amazon leapfrog.

For a while now, tech earnings have been good and powering the markets higher. So has the Trump bump trade been powering markets.

But that all went for naught last week because on Halloween, we saw a Halloween trick. Markets turned around pretty hastily. Stocks that were doing really well turned tail. Friday was a followthrough on the downside and we ended with a tough week.

S&P was down 1.4% last week. Yikes. That’s after great gains in some big tech names. In other words, the very weighty issues that should have elevated the S&P wasn’t enough.

The Nasdaq Composite was even worse. Down 1.5% on the week. A takeaway from there is nervous investors are just reaching over that sell button, looking for a reason to sell.

They thought they saw a reason to sell oil last week as oil went down price wise. Because when Israel attacked Iran’s military installations, there was no rebuttal. There was no reprisal. And so we thought, well, if there’s not really going to be anything happening from Iran’s side, then maybe we won’t see a larger conflagration in the Middle East. And so oil went down. That’s already over. This morning, Monday morning, oil futures up.

Oil is going to rise a few percentage points today, and Iran has promised, “Oh, yeah. We’re going to hit back.”

They’re basically saying there’s no limit to what they might do. So that’s something to worry about coming up.

It’s going to be an interesting week. You know what’s happening. Tomorrow, we have the election.

The Trump bump trade is already getting a hit in the futures market because of an Iowa poll that showed Harris perhaps three percentage points up on Trump. Now, Trump won Iowa in 2020. He won in 2016. Now all of a sudden, a Democrat is in the lead in Iowa. That’s putting a little bit of, I would say, a dark cloud over and above the Trump bump trades.

So what should you watch?

Bank stocks, financials, the crypto space… because those are part of the Trump bump trades that have gone higher on expectations for a Donald Trump victory.

Now, this poll is one poll. I don’t think it means everything, but perhaps it’s telling to a lot of folks that, hey, if Iowa can turn, then other parts of the country are perhaps more uncertain.

It’s going to be a wild week. That’s Tuesday.

We don’t know if we’ll know who the president is Wednesday morning. I doubt we’ll know Tuesday evening… and probably not Wednesday.

My guess is this going to be contested every which way to Sunday, and we may not know who the president is going to be for some time. Markets don’t like that. There’s going to be a lot of nervousness out there. People put their hands on that sell button with markets falling last week. There’s a lot of nervousness, and it’s going to build.

Thursday, we have the Federal Reserve.

The betting is for a 25-basis-point cut, but markets aren’t going to be looking at that until Thursday. They’re going to be looking at the election, and even if they expect a 25-basis-point cut from the Treasury, it’s not going to be anything monumental. Yes, that’s important, but it’s the election first.

But there’s something else going on…

How about 20% of S&P 500 companies are reporting earnings this week. That’s a lot. So while everything is going on geopolitically and domestically, politically, we’ve got the mother’s milk of stock market moves, earnings coming out, a lot of them.

We have the likes of Palantir. We have the likes of ARM Holdings. We’ve got Qualcomm.

In energy space, which has also done very well because of the demand for data centers and the buildout of data centers and electrification of AI and what it’s going to take to power AI.

Constellation Energy reports this week. Duke Energy reports this week. So we’ve seen gains in the energy sector, in utilities because of the AI bump.

But last week, some of the reason we saw the sell-off on Halloween and on Friday is once again, the rhetoric is, “Oh my gosh, look what happened to Microsoft. Did they overspend on AI? Are they going to take years, decades to see the kind of return we thought we were going to see out of them and their AI spend in a matter of a year or two at the most?”

That’s back on the table AI spend ridiculous? Will it translate to the bottom line? And when?

So that’s what we saw Halloween and on Friday, the fall sell-off.

This morning, Monday morning, futures, I’m going to say slightly higher, mostly flat at least through the opening. Then we’ll see.

So the takeaway here is all the stuff that’s happening this week, especially the earnings, because in between all the noise of the election and the noise of the Fed, there’s going to be real reports on real companies and what their earnings are.

That’s the thing to watch because it’s going to be an interesting… or, as I prefer to say, absolutely wild week.

It’s insane. It’s going to be one of the craziest weeks, I think, in a long, long time.

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Be careful out there, and stick with me to double your money.

I’ll catch you guys. Cheers.