MSFT and META Head Into Earnings Season With the Worst Possible Timing
With oil above $94, a jury going rogue on social media, and the Fed back in play, Q1 earnings are about to land in a minefield
Ticker Ratings
| Ticker | Rating | Entry Price | Current | $ Gain | % Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| META Meta Platforms, Inc. | sell | $550.00 | — | — | — |
| GOOGL Alphabet Inc. | hold | $281.87 | — | — | — |
| MSFT MICROSOFT CORP | sell | $366.77 | — | — | — |
| AMZN AMAZON COM INC | buy | $208.04 | — | — | — |
| WBD Warner Bros. Discovery, Inc. | hold | $27.11 | — | — | — |
| NFLX NETFLIX INC | buy | $94.00 | — | — | — |
| VLO VALERO ENERGY CORP/TX | buy | $248.75 | — | — | — |
Earnings season is pulling up to the drive-through window, and the menu just changed — oil is at $94/barrel, the S&P 500 is down ~1.5%, and markets are now pricing a 42% probability of a Fed rate hike by October, up from 19% the day before. That's not the backdrop retail traders were drawing up on their whiteboards in January.
$META is arguably in the hottest water. A landmark jury verdict found Meta and Google liable for social media addiction harms — the first of its kind — with legal experts eyeing roughly 3,000 pending plaintiffs and potential damages approaching $20 billion. Shares dropped 8.1% in their worst intraday session since October, and Harvard Law professors are calling it a watershed moment. Meanwhile, $MSFT walks into earnings already carrying the baggage of its OpenAI dependency, with Intelligent Alpha's AI models actively avoiding it in favor of $AMZN and competitors. And $WBD just got swallowed by Paramount SkyDance in a $110 billion deal, leaving the combined entity to wrestle an integration nightmare right as ad markets wobble.
Retail sentiment on r/investing is oddly zen — posts debating ETF timing and renewable energy themes suggest the average investor is playing the long game while traders on YouTube are panic-buying puts. Apollo's Torsten Slok thinks a Fed hike is still a tail risk, but in an earnings season where oil shocks, litigation bombs, and AI leadership reshuffles are all live grenades, 'extremely unlikely' is doing a lot of heavy lifting.