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☕️ GM Munchers! It's Thursday, but in summer Thursday is basically Friday, and Friday is basically the weekend, which means by that math I should already be at the golf course instead of watching my portfolio act bipolar.

On today’s menu:

• 🚗 Tesla’s Earnings Were Ugly. Now What?

• 🔍 Google Just Answered Its Critics

• 💬 Reddit Crashes After Dumb Decision

• 🥈 Silver Broke $60. Is The Metals Trade Back?

• 🚀 SpaceX Has Lost $1.5 Trillion

Yesterday’s numbers:

BREAKING NEWS

🚗 Tesla’s Earnings Were Ugly. Now What?

It’s never a dull moment for Tesla shareholders. $TSLA reported earnings after the bell yesterday, and the numbers tell a strange story. Revenue hit $28.4 billion, up 26% from a year ago and deliveries hit a record 480,126 vehicles.

But profits? They went the wrong way.

Net income fell 5% to $1.11 billion and earnings came in at 32 cents a share, down from 33 cents a year ago and well short of what Wall Street wanted. That means Tesla sold a quarter more cars but made less money doing it.

• 💸 Cash turned negative. Free cash flow came in at negative $1.1 billion. Last quarter it was positive $1.44 billion.

• 🏗️ Spending exploded. Capital spending jumped 142% to $5.79 billion on Optimus robots, Cybercab, and AI data centers.

• 📱 One bright spot. Full Self-Driving subscriptions grew 56% to 1.48 million users, and services revenue jumped 50%.

Here's the milestone buried in the mess. Tesla has now brought in more than $100 billion in revenue over the past four quarters, the first time that's ever happened. But even with that incredible feat, the stock still trades near 350 times earnings which is an insane valuation. Oh, and Elon's other company that’s trying to get people to Mars isn't helping the mood either. SpaceX just hit a fresh record low yesterday, down about 48% from its June peak.

🐂 The Bull Case:

• FSD subscriptions are real recurring revenue at high margins.

• Deliveries grew year over year for the first time in two years.

• The spending builds robots and robotaxis, not just cars.

🐻 The Bear Case:

• Record sales produced lower profit, which means heavy discounting.

• The cash burn is new and it's large.

• A price-to-earnings ratio near 350 leaves no room for a stumble.

• Special Report: The Top 9 Data Center Stocks For 2026 (via StockEarnings)

The Munch Take: Tesla just proved it can sell cars again but it also proved that selling them costs more than it used to. A company priced at 350 times earnings needs the robot story to work, and that story doesn't have a delivery date yet. My wife asked why the company is spending billions on humanoid robots when the cars are the thing making money. I explained the long-term vision for about six minutes. She said it sounded like an expensive hobby. I don't have a rebuttal.

🔍 Google Just Answered Its Critics With A $514 Billion Backlog

Alphabet ($GOOGL) also reported earnings after the close yesterday and the top line was a blowout. Revenue came in at $119.8 billion, up 24% from a year ago and well past the $116.9 billion Wall Street wanted. That's now the 12th quarter in a row of double-digit growth.

For a company of this size to be growing that fast? Unheard of.

A lot of it is thanks to their cloud business. Google Cloud pulled in $24.8 billion, growing 82% from last year when analysts expected 64%. Backlog, meaning work already booked but not yet delivered, sits at $514 billion.

• 📈 Reported earnings hit $9.11 a share. Analysts wanted $2.89, though most of that gap comes from paper gains on Alphabet's stakes in other companies.

• ☁️ Cloud is outrunning everyone. Google's cloud growth is now faster than Microsoft's and Amazon's.

• 📉 The stock came in wounded. Shares dropped 4.4% on July 16, erasing about $200 billion, after Bloomberg reported the Gemini 3.5 Pro model is months behind schedule.

That Gemini delay is why this report mattered so much. Google promised its most powerful model in June and shipped only the smaller version. As a result, the stock trades around $345, well below its high just over $400.

🐂 The Bull Case:

• Cloud growth of 82% is real revenue, not a promise.

• A $514 billion backlog means years of booked work.

• The stock is cheaper than most mega-cap tech on forward earnings.

• Free Report: Buy this stock tomorrow (via Chaikin Analytics)

🐻 The Bear Case:

• The giant EPS beat is mostly investment markups, not operations.

• Gemini is still late with no firm launch date.

• Capital spending guidance runs as high as $190 billion this year.

The Munch Take: The cloud number is the one that counts, and it's excellent. The earnings number is the one everyone will quote, but it's mostly bookkeeping. Google answered the question about whether the business is working but it didn't answer the question about whether the model ships. Is the stock a buy? For a company of this size to be growing as fast as it is, it’s truly incredible and considering it’s also trading at a 12% discount from it’s all-time high, it’s worth watching closely.

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MARKET OVERVIEW

🍿 Tasty Movers & Shakers

🔌 $AMD Advanced Micro Devices added 1.45% on a new partnership with Anthropic that includes a potential investment of up to $5 billion. The chip orders don't start shipping until 2027 but Wall Street decided to celebrate now anyway.

🖥️ $SMCI Super Micro Computer surged 19.84% after preliminary results showed far stronger profitability than investors expected and the company nearly doubled its own margin forecast. When a business tells you it makes twice as much money as it thought last quarter, investors get happy.

🚬 $PM Philip Morris advanced 3.33% on an earnings beat and a rebound in Zyn nicotine pouch shipments. Turns out every influencer with a tin in their pocket adds up to a real business. Somewhere an analyst had to write the phrase "pouch volume growth" with a straight face.

💬 $RDDT Reddit fell 8.32% amid reports it may block Google from using its content to train AI models. Reddit's whole pitch to investors was licensing its conversations to AI companies. Cutting off the biggest buyer is a bold way to run that playbook.

🌬️ $GEV GE Vernova slipped 8.69% as a 40% decline in its wind business weighed on earnings. The power side of the company is booming on data center demand but the wind side is doing the opposite, and that gap is getting hard to ignore.

CHART OF THE DAY

🥈 Silver Broke $60. Is The Metals Trade Back?

Silver climbed above $60 an ounce yesterday, up around 9% in four sessions. Gold moved with it, reaching about $4,150 and touching its highest level since July 7. Both metals are responding to a worsening fight in the Middle East, with strikes on Iran, threats to shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, and Brent crude pushing above $92.

Here's the part that should look strange. When war headlines hit, money normally runs to the dollar, and a strong dollar usually pushes metals down. Gold and silver are priced in dollars, so a stronger dollar makes them more expensive for everyone else. The dollar did rally but metals still went up anyway.

• 🛢️ Oil is the reason both can win. Higher energy costs push inflation expectations up, and metals are what people buy when they're worried about inflation.

• 📉 Almost everyone had already sold. Long positions in silver ETFs hit an 11.5-month low this week, down from a 3.5-year high in December. Gold ETF holdings hit a 9.5-month low.

• 🏦 Central banks keep buying regardless. China's central bank added 320,000 ounces of gold in May, its biggest monthly purchase in 17 months and the 19th straight month of buying.

That second point matters most. When a market gets that washed out, there's almost nobody left to sell, so it takes very little new buying to move the price hard. That's why the bounce looks violent even though the fundamentals didn't change overnight.

Here's what to actually watch. The Federal Reserve meets July 28 and 29, and traders are still pricing in at least one rate hike this year, not a cut. Higher rates hurt metals because gold and silver don't pay you anything to hold them. There are also reports of mediators pushing for a short truce to reopen shipping lanes. If that lands, the war premium comes out fast.

The Munch Take: Silver is still down roughly half from its January peak near $118, and gold is down about a quarter from its own high above $5,600. That's the context for calling these levels interesting, and it's also the reason to stay honest about it. A four-day bounce off a washed-out base is not the same thing as a new trend. The Fed meeting next week probably matters more than any headline out of Hormuz. My wife asked why I keep talking about silver when I don't own any. I said I'm waiting for the right entry. But long-term, we’d feel confident buying at these levels. Not financial advice.

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TRADING SUCCESS

🤑 Thursday Motivation

🚀 Pre-Market Fuel

1. 👀 Fidelity just bought $23 million of Bitcoin.

2. 🇨🇦 The Canadian Dollar is not doing so well.

3. 🤔 Life advice from a billionaire.

4. 🚀 SpaceX is down 49% and has lost $1.5 trillion.

🍪 Munchy Memes

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