Diamonds and Dogs

4/24/18

Boring is beautiful. Verizon (VZ) is up 2% following in line earnings. The telecom giant recorded 260,000 postpaid net additions of mobile devices and net gain of 220,000 postpaid smartphones with the lowest churn rate in the industry. The analyst at Barclays called Verizon a steal at current levels. He upgraded the stock with a $56 price target. Not bad for a boring phone company.

Tech is on the wane. Alphabet (GOOG) reported blow out earnings beating estimates by 7% as revenue rose 25% to $31.15 billion, but the stock is lower by 3% on concerns of rising spending and costs. But the company also spent at historic levels, nearly tripling capital expenditure for the quarter to $7.7 billion. Almost all of that spending went to buttress newer cloud and consumer-device businesses that lag behind leaders Amazon.com Inc. and Apple Inc. After neglecting these markets for years in favor of its main ad businesses and riskier moonshot bets, Alphabet is now splurging to catch up. Google isn't the only tech lower. Facebook, Corning, Amazon, Apple, Micron and Netflix are lower.