Investors Are Missing The Best Opportunity In Years

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
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**Joseph Carlson** (1:00)
Welcome back, everyone. Today on The Joseph Carlson Show, we have the most important earnings week of the entire earnings season. This is it. This is the big one for this quarter. And if we look at the earnings calendar, it's literally overflowing. We have so many companies reporting. Many of them are big ones that you likely have in your portfolio. Things really start to kick off tomorrow. So on Tuesday right here, we have companies that you've heard of, Coca-Cola and Boeing reporting earnings. Those ones aren't as interesting to me. But then we have S&P Global. This is a big holding of mine, one of my largest investments. I'm looking forward to this one. I'll be going over some thoughts of what I expect. Then further down this list, we have PayPal. I don't like PayPal stock. I think investors should sell it, and I'll be making the bare case for this company. We also have Visa reporting Tuesday after market close. Then we have on Thursday Mastercard reporting as well. Now I have a huge holding of Mastercard. We'll be going over both of these companies together. But then Wednesday after market, this is where we get into the big ones. We have Meta and Microsoft both reporting earnings at the exact same time. Meta and Microsoft have both performed poorly this year. Meta is down around 7%, Microsoft's down around 17%, while the overall market's going up. So these two companies, these incredible companies, are selling at low valuations, they're beat up, and the market seemingly wants nothing to do with them. The market is sick and tired of AI and capex spend. The market wants returns. So we'll be looking at these companies, if they can provide the line of sight to returns that the market's demanding. We also have things continuing on Thursday. Right now, Apple is the favorite of investors. The stock continues to soar to all time highs, while companies like Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft have continued to go down. Is this going to continue going forward? Will Apple just keep sailing away this earning season? Or will Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta report earnings that are good enough to lift these companies? And we're going to be going through all of it. Plus we have some big news to get to. For example, ASML stock dropped around 7% on the day on a report that China is now making their DUV machines. They're making their own. Big companies are starting to hire again. I've been saying this for a long period of time. So this article is basically just a told you so. And then we have the fail of the week, which in this case is Paramount, as they struggle to complete a merger that they desperately need. So we have a ton to get into. Now, while lots of investment groups charge anywhere from 50 to $200 per month to be a part of them, Qualtrum is just $10 a month. And Qualtrum includes things like earnings calendars, advanced chart builders. You have the Insights page, which gives you a rundown of every company, all the important metrics that you want to look at. It has all that software, plus a sprawling community of investors, with over 10,000 investors on a moderated Discord. On top of that, we also have Qualtrum Studio, which has original exclusive content. We have more content, things like reviews on the Fitbit Air, reviews on the Metaglasses. I have deep dives into different companies. We have all sorts of different content. All of this is included at one price, a membership for $10 per month, or even a discounted price at an annual membership. Try it out now, riskree at qualtrum.com. Now, as we get into this week, the first company that I want to highlight here is on Tuesday. If I go down, we see PayPal here reporting earnings tomorrow before market open. Now, PayPal's earnings, this scatter chart shows no pattern, and that's how their earnings have been. It's been all over the place. We show the estimates. They often come above estimates, and they'll likely do so again, but PayPal beating estimates by a couple cents isn't really a bull case. In fact, the important thing when looking at earnings like these is the earnings represent short-term confirmations. You have things like the earnings analyst estimates and whether they came in above or below these estimates. Those analyst estimates are usually pretty good. Most companies come in right above or right below. Every once in a while, you'll get a huge blowout like Nvidia has done in the past, but overall the analyst assessments are short-term in nature. What we do as investors is we look long-term. Long-term is called the story of a stock. When you look beyond the next 12 months and you look at what the company is going to do, its structural advantages, its competitive structure, all of that, that is the story of a company. The company has a really good story. That's a company that you want to find a buy-in price, the time where you can buy in at an attractive price, and then you watch this story and whether or not these earnings reports confirm the story ahead. So when I look at PayPal, I think that this quarter, they'll likely be on earnings. In the short term, that's good. And annual assessments are usually pretty good in the short term. Notwithstanding that, I believe PayPal is a sell. It's a company that I don't think investors should spend their time on. I don't believe that individual investors should invest in. I think it's a waste of time. PayPal is a complex business, not complex in the way of Amazon or Google, where they have lots of quality assets, all growing independently. No, PayPal is convoluted, complex in all the wrong ways. It is a company that is unwieldy. Even the new CEO that was over into it, that did a great job, couldn't fix PayPal. In fact, a hedge fund that recently sold their position at a loss in PayPal, they finally threw in the towel, perhaps said at best, here's what they wrote as they exited this company. We were wrong, not about the price, but with the business. We severely underestimated PayPal's operational bloat and the extent of the required fixing and consolidation. PayPal's acquisition history left behind a sprawling empire of disconnected platforms, Braintree, Venmo, Zettel, Hyperwallet, Zoom, Honey, Paydey.