That's the first and most likely explanation for why I gave Peloton's quarter an A- and Wall Street took the stock out back and shot it.
I don't own Peloton shares because I was counting on an incremental 10c on EPS. Not this quarter. Not this year. I refuse to believe otherwise smart people would sell $PTON down 10% or more because of the EPS miss.
I didn't expect a lot of sales from hardware. If you want a Peloton bike you probably have a Peloton bike. Peloton also fired its head of Marketing in April. If you're new to investing in the consumer space here's a tip: No one fires their head of marketing a week before they report earnings because sales are going great.
I wanted to see low Churn (1.2%... perfect). Strong Cash Flow ($96M from ops, so good (for them)) and ongoing cuts (TBH, and this also goes against the building consensus) I'd like to see more aggression on doing things like moving out of the retail stores (more on that below).
If Peloton is generating ~$100M / quarter and subs aren't leaving the company simply isn't a zero. It's a target. Works better as part of a streaming service or private or...
Peloton shares are down pre-market despite the company doing just about anything analysts could have asked from it.
Churn hit 1.2% despite a massive drop in marketing spend. As mentioned in the preview yesterday, if Peloton can retain the lucrative connected fitness subscribers (a decent proxy for customer satisfaction) and maintain disciplined spending you suddenly have a nice little cash flowing company with almost no built-in growth expectations.
A year ago then CEO Barry McCarthy resigned with the turnaround admittedly unfinished. Barry was smart and well-meaning but he was still clinging to the idea of Peloton has a growth company. A reset was needed and that's what Peloton has gotten.
Debt is down huge over the last year, cash flow has been positive 5 quarters in a row and Peloton is finally hinting at getting out of the stores which have been driving me quietly insane for years.
The call is starting but I wanted to get a note out. Barring something very bad from the company on the call Peloton is being punished for a quarter which is, at worst, an A- (Yes, Peloton is graded much easier than, say, Amazon).
Uber $UBER reported mixed results this quarter, topping revenue, but missing EPS expectations.
Instead of celebrating what seemed to be a decent quarter, the stock dipped 2.5% on the day.
That’s not what strength looks like.
Revenue growth is slowing, and the company's sales and marketing spend is ramping up. This is a red flag for a business that’s supposed to be "scaling efficiently."
So while the revenue numbers came in hot, the internals are raising eyebrows.
In this tape, surface-level beats won’t cut it. Investors want margin discipline, accelerating growth, and clean execution.
Uber didn’t deliver that. And the market responded accordingly.
This wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t convincing either.
So what else did we learn from yesterday's earnings reactions? Let’s dive into the details.
Here are the latest earnings reports from the S&P 500 👇
*Click the image to enlarge it
Charles River Laboratories $CRL had the best reaction score...
Every day, we sift through the filings to spot where the real conviction lies — cutting through the noise to highlight the most meaningful insider moves.
Here's what stood out today:
📌 Powell Industries $POWL — This is the headliner. Kovitz Investment Group just filed a 13G, revealing a 13.49% passive stake in this small-cap electrical equipment name.
Kovitz is a value-focused investment firm known for taking concentrated, long-term positions in underappreciated companies. When they show up with a size like this, it sends a clear signal.
📌The CEOs of Pebblebrook Hotel Trust $PEB, Huntsman Corp $HUN, and WillScot Holdings $WSC just filed Form 4s revealing open market buys of $600,000, $493,000, and $268,000 worth of their own stock, respectively.
Here’s The Hot Corner, with data from May 7, 2025:
Technology just printed its first green box in nearly three months.
Yesterday, I touched on the Growth vs. Value ratio and how Growth looks ready to regain leadership as markets recover from recent losses.
Adding fuel to that view, Technology — a cornerstone of the Growth trade — has reversed its breakdown relative to the broader market. That’s a failed move worth paying attention to.
You cannot miss this chart.
The setup is now in place: after a sluggish start to the year, Tech looks ready to step back into a leadership role.
Given its heavy weighting in U.S. indexes, this could be the tailwind needed to push the market toward fresh highs.
Steve Strazza caught this rotation in real time — flipping from puts to calls and riding the bounce with six trades that have already doubled.
My gut’s been talking lately—and it’s telling me that the odds of a market pullback are on the rise.
After a string of strong sessions, it’s only natural that the market might need to catch its breath. But it’s not just that. If we do head back toward the recent lows, I don’t expect it to be quiet. There will be noise. A lot of noise.
Some voices will shout that we’re “retesting the lows”—a technical inevitability, they’ll argue. Others will pound the table that this whole bounce was nothing more than a dead cat bounce, and that the real drop is just beginning.
I’ve got my own hunch about how this might play out—something I discussed on this morning’s Options Jam Session (watch below). But regardless of how far we pull back, I’m increasingly focused on one specific area of the market: housing stocks.
If things get slippery from here, I think the housing sector is particularly vulnerable. That vulnerability could come from multiple angles: rising rates, shifting consumer sentiment, or simply relative underperformance catching up with absolute price.
Uber has significant resistance a little higher. The amount of patterns coming together is pretty impressive. In no particular order, LOG projection, 1.618 extension, 3 drives to a top w/ a 'nested' butterfly sell along w/ measured moves all coming together in/around the 90-95 level. Expect this to be formidable resistance to higher. If it gaps and goes above this level, then believe Uber has underlying strength for a much higher move. Holding judgement till the levels mentioned (90-95) are firmly smashed in a move higher.
My gut tells me the odds of a pullback in the markets are increasing. And the next pullback in the direction back to recent lows will likely come with a lot of noise. There will be lots of shouts about "retesting lows," from some camps, and other shouts of "this was just a dead cat bounce, we're going much lower!" from other camps.
I have a hunch of how that plays out, which I discussed on this morning's Options Jam Session.
But if the market gets slippery here, and especially if the shouting class gets it right, I think housing sector stocks are vulnerable.
Macke portfolio holding Peloton reports in the morning. Officially the Street is looking for a loss of 6c on ~$650mm for the quarter and about $2.5b in revenue for the year, cranking out about $300 to $350 million EBITDA.
But that's not what I'll be watching. I'm grading the company on Churn, Cuts and Cashflow. I don't really care if Peloton is selling a lot of bikes. The head of marketing got fired last week so I suspect they aren't. Bikes and Treads and rowing machines crank out 1/3 of Peloton's revenues but it's only a 13.5% gross margin business. With Tariffs that margins falls to nothing-ish. Peloton runs inventory lean and has China exposure so there could be headlines related to moving product around ahead of the tariffs. Under old management that would be scary. The new team seems quite competent. Both me and the Street will forgive a little inventory kerfuffle.
If Peloton can't get more apparel and decides to close its pointless stores I'll be almost giddy.
So the tariff doesn't scare me.
Investors need to see churn (the number of people who quit) stay low (under 2%). This is a hard time of the year for churn but that's the key to Peloton as an...
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After watching a few Red Flag Alerts Focus List stocks rip yesterday, I posted on social media...
In this scan, we look to identify the strongest growth stocks as they climb the market-cap ladder from small- to mid- to large- and, ultimately, to mega cap status (over $200B).
Once they graduate from small-cap to mid-cap status (over $2B), they come on our radar. Likewise, when they surpass the roughly $30B mark, they roll off our list.
But the scan doesn't just end there.
We only want to look at the strongest growth industries in the market, as that is typically where these potential 50-baggers come from.
Some of the best performers in recent decades – stocks like Priceline, Amazon, Netflix, Salesforce, and myriad others – would have been on this list at some point during their journey to becoming the market behemoths they are today.
When you look at the stocks in our table, you'll notice we're only focused on Technology and Growth industry groups such as Software, Semiconductors, Online...
Uber is is pulling back premarket, ostensibly on slightly light revenues and solid but not spectacular guide. At least that's going to be the reason analysts will cite for not taking up their ratings on Uber, despite the company crushing on trailing numbers and guiding to just a whisper better than estimates for the current quarter.
The truth is both more nuanced and quite simple.
1. ) UBER shares are up 42% since April 6th. As discussed on Monday, Uber needed gargantuan numbers across the board. In this economy? Was never going to happen. The stock needed a little rest. We'll see how fast buyers come in:
Yesterday's Pre-Chart:
2.) This wasn't a quarter that was going to change anyone's mind. Uber didn't post terrible news as the stock fell from $80 to $60 earlier this year. It just got dragged down the rest of the flotsam, with a bunch of misunderstood news about autonomous vehicles thrown in on top of it.
Now that Uber has reported huge earnings and cash flow analysts with a bearish take will go back to mumbling about unsustainability and the ever-looming threat of Tesla releasing a fleet of cabs.