 The Market Sum | Insight after the bell
By Caleb Silver, Editor in Chief Tuesday's Headlines 1. The S&P500 and Nasdaq have record closes on heels of strong earnings Markets Closed
 Records! Records are made to be broken and that's exactly what happened today as the S&P500 and the Nasdaq both finished the day at closing record closing highs on the back of strong earnings reports from a broad range of companies. Here is a short list of the companies who crushed it last quarter. As you can see, most sectors of the market fared well, which is why the markets did what they did today.
Twitter may have stolen the show, though, and we'll address its blowout results further down.
Another reason the market has been slowly climbing towards this record is that the pessimism going into this earnings season may have been overdone. We knew earnings would be lower than prior quarters given that the wind from the 2017 corporate tax breaks had faded and the economy was slowing. But, expectations may have been too dour now that we see the results. RBC Capital Markets (Royal Bank of Canada) shared this chart today to show how analysts have raised their forecasts as earnings reporting season inched closer.  What Could go Wrong? Plenty...of course. We've only heard from about 35% of the companies in the S&P500, although the early reports are strong. Still, the trade war with China is unresolved and a new one is brewing between the U.S. and Europe. There may be more smoke there than fire, but those issues linger nonetheless.
Closer to the markets, two things stand out:
1 - The VIX or Volatility Index, as it is known, has basically been asleep for several months. Volatility is a measure of activity, and traders need activity to make money. Investors are just fine without it, but we are basically sitting on the sidelines as traders from big institutions are in and out of the market every minute of every day, causing price action and swings. That's what makes a market, and this particular rally that began the day after Christmas has just slowly charged higher with almost no volatility.
2- Trading volume has been really low of late. Yesterday was the lightest trading volume day of the year. It may be due to a late Easter and Spring break this year, but the past several weeks have been light. The concern is that investors who have been sitting on their hands as the market has rallied will come out selling now that we are near record overall highs.
Read more: Why the Smart Money is Selling at Bull Market Peak
Here's a recent chart of trading volume to put things in perspective. 
 photo courtesy of Fortune
Tim Cook Speaks I listened to an interview today with Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, at the TIME 100 Summit in New York City. Cook took over at Apple in 2011 when Steve Jobs was too sick with pancreatic cancer to lead the company. He's led Apple through extraordinary times and has steered its growth towards a $1 trillion market value. Cook has also been very outspoken about civic and ethical issues, including privacy, immigration, limiting screen time for kids and adults, and education. He was interviewed by Nancy Gibbs, Time's former Editor in Chief and now a visiting professor at Harvard. The conversation was about the role of a CEO in society today. Here is a link to clips from that conversation, which is worth a listen.
Here are the points and quotes I took away from their chat:
On Values:
On Politics:
These are the policies Apple is focused on:
Immigration
Education
Health
 chart courtesy tradingview.com
Twitter Roars! Just when you thought Twitter was losing its chirp, the company roars back to life with a break out quarter, beating analyst expectations on nearly every metric, and them some.
Earnings: $0.37 vs. $0.15 estimate Revenue: $787 million vs. $776.1 million estimate Monthly active users: 330 million vs. 318 million estimate
This was also the last quarter that Twitter will report monthly active users (MAUs). The company realized that no one cares how active your users are if you can't make money off of them, and Twitter is figuring out how to do that. As of last quarter Twitter started reporting mDAUs (Monetizable Daily Active Users), which includes users that logged into any Twitter platform and saw advertisements. To that end, Twitter reported 134 million average mDAUs for the first quarter, compared with 120 million a year earlier. In the fourth quarter, Twitter said it had 126 million mDAUs.
If you don't think that Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and Snap are advertising delivery platforms, read their quarterly reports. This is what they do, and how investors reward them. Shares of Twitter shot up 17% today, and are up 10% in the past year.
Jack Dorsey, its CEO, actually does double duty as the CEO of Square, the online payments company. His 2018 salary at Twitter, $1.40 (140 characters in a tweet, get it?)
Besides Twitter, here are today's top movers.
Charts courtesy of www.koyfin.com     Today in History April 23, 1985: Amid huge fanfare, Coca-Cola boss Roberto Goizueta introduces New Coke at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in Manhattans Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. The best, he declares, has been made even better. When it becomes clear that the company is replacing its original formula, rather than offering New Coke alongside it, the company's Atlanta headquarters is deluged with thousands of angry telephone calls from consumers. As one customer complains, Changing Coke is like God making the grass purple or putting toes on our ears or teeth on our knees.
From: Frederick Allen, Secret Formula: How Brilliant Marketing and Relentless Salesmanship Made Coca-Cola the Best-Known Product in the World (HarperBusiness, New York, 1994), pp. 410-414.
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Tuesday, April 23, 2019
New Records
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