Speaker 1
One of the data services goes out and conducts a poll of analysts. What do you think earnings will be? And then it averages those together and it comes up with a consensus number. And depending on which poll you use, you can get different consensus estimates for earnings and other measures. And those are the numbers that companies have to beat. But for companies that make a habit of beating those numbers handily, you'll often hear about whisper numbers. People are saying, hey, it's actually going to be way above the consensus, just like last time. It's going to be this. And then sometimes the analyst will come out and write, here's the whisper number. That always sounds crazy to me. If you're writing it in a report, it's not being whispered anymore. It's no longer a whisper number. You're publishing the number. Anyhow, I think the best measure of whether a company beat expectations on its earnings report is whether the stock price jumps. And in this case, it didn't really. But our Barron's colleague, Tay Kim, who just finished writing a book on NVIDIA and a cover story for Barron's on the company, he wrote, I wouldn't read too much into the initial reaction, which could easily be some profit taking, given that the stock has roughly tripled this year. Instead, he wrote, investors should not overlook the unprecedented magnitude of NVIDIA's performance. Triple digit growth rates while making tens of billions of dollars isn't normal. He writes about the company's next generation Blackwell chips and staggering demand for them and how that should set the company up for a prosperous year next year, too. OK, so why are we talking about Qualcomm? I'll tell you why, because Qualcomm's talking about Qualcomm. They hosted an investor day this past week, and they laid out a plan for getting the stock price moving. I mean, I don't really say that's the point of the investor's day. Companies never come out and say, hey, the point here is we're trying to make the stock go up. I think that would be poor form, right? Yeah, I think so. Instead, they talk about how they're going to make more money.