Joey Loss 0:01

All right. Welcome back to another episode of Wealth Unplugged. This is a market chatter episode dated May 1st, 2026. My name is Joey Loss.

Adam Van Wie 0:09

And I'm Adam Van Wie.

Joey Loss 0:12

And man, has the market taken a turn since the last time we were sitting here doing this.

Adam Van Wie 0:18

You could say that we just had one of the best months since 2020. So it's been pretty incredible.

Joey Loss 0:24

April's just doing that these days.

Adam Van Wie 0:27

Yeah, it's almost inexplicable. And if you're following the news cycle, it's certainly not matching the market right now.

Joey Loss 0:36

Yeah. April's supposed to be a crappy month and like the last 2 years have just blown up those stats.

Adam Van Wie 0:41

Yeah. Although it does add credence to the old sell in May or go away.

Joey Loss 0:47

Yeah, possibly. Possibly. Yeah. So the last 30 days Nasdaq's up 14.76%.

Joey Loss 0:56

But it's worth noting that before the market opened today and I had this chart up, it was 19%, which just reminds me that there was a 5% day. You remember that? Like 31 days ago that fell off as the market opened today. That's 31, 31 days. It was 20%. Just a crazy comeback.

Adam Van Wie 1:15

Did anyone time this market?

Joey Loss 1:18

I don't know. I don't know. You'd have to— I'm sure somebody did. I mean, somebody has been timing oil, but that's another story.

Adam Van Wie 1:26

Yeah. Oil is not seemingly connected with this market at all.

Joey Loss 1:34

It was just crazy because the last— I mean, I think I titled the last episode, uh, some things are looking good, but oil might ruin everything or something like that.

Adam Van Wie 1:43

Yeah. I mean, we were all—

Joey Loss 1:44

all our research was focused on oil.

Adam Van Wie 1:46

Yeah. And for the last, the month before this, as oil went up, the market went down and it was almost a direct correlation. And then something happened at the beginning of 30 days ago and it just completely stopped. The correlation just ended and oil's remained higher than I expected, honestly. And the market has not cared.

Joey Loss 2:12

Yeah. Well, it seems like there's, there's 4 main areas that I think we should just touch on today. This doesn't need to be super long. But number 1 is corporate profits, which look just awesome. And I think that's a big part of all the positivity we've seen in market performance. This is technically the strongest margin expansion since 2009.

Adam Van Wie 2:33

That's incredible because in 2009, we were coming off a base where corporate profits had cratered, absolutely cratered. So you, it's much easier to grow profits after a big drawdown than, than we, we haven't seen anything like that. We're at all-time highs after all-time highs. And to see that kind of expansion is, is really incredible. And I think you're right. That is why the market's doing so well.

Joey Loss 2:59

Yeah. The S&P 500 earnings are growing at a pace of over 15% year over year. That's just absurd. For large companies, that is incredible. Another topic, geopolitics. I mean, this is all anyone's hearing about. This ties into the next topic, which is energy prices. On the geopolitical front, there was high initial panic. We saw that in the markets. That was the story of March. April was kind of the story of people cooling off, which to give us our

Adam Van Wie 3:06

That is absurd.

Joey Loss 3:34

our credit. Like, I think in March, we looked back at other data from other conflicts, and it's pretty much the same pattern every time. Everybody assumes the worst. And then, you know, not that good things are going on necessarily for anybody involved, but

Joey Loss 3:50

things calm down, people get their heads under control and kind of look to the future again. And at the end of the day, if companies are making profits, stocks go up.

Adam Van Wie 3:58

Yeah, I mean, it depends what you're looking at. I don't think that anything has been resolved in Iran, but if we can not have the politicians murdering innocent civilians for speaking out against them in the streets, I think that's a pretty big win.

Joey Loss 4:18

Yeah. Yeah.

Joey Loss 4:21

And then on the energy price front, Brent crude. Was up, then it was down. Now it's back up to over $110 a barrel. US gas is hanging out above $4 a gallon at best, depending on what state you're in. Hawaii, California, it could be a lot higher than that.

Adam Van Wie 4:36

A friend of mine from California texted me a picture yesterday of $7 gas.

Joey Loss 4:41

Yikes, that is brutal. And so, yeah, obviously that's not great. That affects things like consumer discretionary spending. We'll get into it. But It's not inflation if it's temporary, but if it hangs out, it can be inflationary.

Adam Van Wie 4:53

Absolutely. Yeah. But typically oil prices, because they are cyclical,

Adam Van Wie 4:59

they will have a temporary effect on inflation. But hopefully if they come back down soon enough, we will see prices go back down to reflect that because it is such a, it's an input into everything. But if you look at the price of oil throughout history, even recent history, it's been as high as, I don't know, $120 and higher down to Briefly, oil futures went negative for a brief period in the last 10 years. So it's just one of those things that is really affected by the cyclical nature of the business, by supply and demand, and by things like Middle Eastern tension or war, whatever you want to call it.

Joey Loss 5:42

Yeah. And then the last topic is monetary policy, which, you know, the first 3 are affecting that one. So we'll get into it. Soon there's going to be some shifts on that front.

Joey Loss 5:55

But anyway, starting with corporate profits, this week was a big week. I'm kind of glad we're recording today. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all reported, I think on Wednesday. And God, they're just kicking butt. Like Google is up. So their revenue is up 22% year over year to $110 billion.

Joey Loss 6:17

And net income soared 81%.

Adam Van Wie 6:22

Wow.

Joey Loss 6:23

That's Google. This is like top 5 biggest companies in the world and it grew 80%. It just makes me feel bad. Like, you know, it's like any small business owner who should be more nimble.

Adam Van Wie 6:34

Crazy.

Adam Van Wie 6:36

We don't have the capacity to do that. That would be, we'd outgrow ourselves in a few months if we did that.

Joey Loss 6:44

Yeah. And the drivers here, Google Cloud, anything with the word cloud is the driver for every one of these companies. AI cloud, Google Cloud, storage, whatever you want to call it. And it's up huge. They have huge margins. And that's why revenue can grow 22%, but profits up way higher percentage. It's just because of how profitable these sections of the businesses are.

Adam Van Wie 7:07

Yeah, they're extremely low cost to add incremental capacity to those types of businesses. And so it's

Adam Van Wie 7:15

It's just an incredible business model, but certainly this won't last forever. I mean, especially with the advent of AI, I think that, I think that for this moment in time, they should take advantage of it and they clearly are, but there's just no way. This is how capitalism really works when other companies are going to see those crazy margins that they're making and the space will quickly become flooded with new capacity. And you will not see those margins continue forever unless they find some way to defend, put a moat around that business, which I just don't know if it's possible or not.

Joey Loss 7:55

And it looks like they're all betting that this won't last forever because most of them are turning around and spending over $100 billion on infrastructure buildout for the AI chapter you've pointed to. Yeah. Going on to Meta, Revenue jumped 33% to $56 billion. Net income climbed 61%. Again, you see that spread there. They're just doing highly profitable things. Their ad impressions are up. They've started implementing more AI tools in their

Joey Loss 8:23

tracking of users to figure out the best place to put ads, and it's working. They've also hiked their CapEx forecast. Their stock actually fell a little bit recently, and it's just because they're spending so much and investors don't feel like they have a really clear understanding of what that spending is supposed to do. I don't think that's going to stop really. And I don't know that it's going to matter materially long-term if people trade up and down 5%.

Adam Van Wie 8:47

Yeah, it only, it only matters if it doesn't work, then it'll matter. If they don't realize the gains that they think they're going to realize, then clearly that investment wasn't worth it. And maybe that 5% drop was warranted. But the fact is nobody knows the answer to that. Today.

Joey Loss 9:05

Yeah, that's fair. I mean, all that. Yeah, I agree with that. The profit growth is related to businesses that have been around a little bit and don't necessarily stay, you know, a peep about where this $100 billion is going and whether it's manifesting in more profits from another place.

Joey Loss 9:23

Amazon.

Joey Loss 9:26

Amazon is a company I just would not bet against. Their net sales Net sales hit $181 billion, up 17% year over year. AWS revenue accelerated, accelerated by 28% to $38 billion, marking the fastest growth rate in 3 years.

Adam Van Wie 9:44

Wow.

Joey Loss 9:46

Due to heavy enterprise AI spending. So somehow they figured out how to profit from the infrastructure buildout itself.

Adam Van Wie 9:53

Yeah, that's— that is not something I would have guessed because Nvidia obviously positioned to take advantage of that. But Amazon, I, I never would have guessed that.

Joey Loss 10:06

And then lastly, Microsoft, um, revenue climbed 18%, net income up 23%. Microsoft Cloud brought in $54.5 billion, up 29%, powered by Azure cloud growth of 40%. And I just can't believe those Azure numbers because of all these things, I think Azure might be the most profitable piece of any of these businesses. It's like— Margins in the high 60%.

Adam Van Wie 10:32

it's unbelievable.

Adam Van Wie 10:35

Yeah, that's— I don't think there's other businesses outside of like maybe luxury goods, like handbags that cost $100 to make that they sell for $15,000. But outside of that, what other business has margins like that?

Joey Loss 10:54

I don't know. I really can't think of anything. And it's interesting because I'm talking about the NASDAQ and S&P, everybody's up the last month. If you look at the MAGS, MAG7 ETF, it's up 2% for the year. So these giant titans are not contributing that materially to the gains that we're seeing. It's the other stocks.

Adam Van Wie 11:15

I hear that news. I think that's fantastic.

Joey Loss 11:18

Yeah, I mean, just imagine if these guys, if these, if there wasn't infrastructure buildout concerns, what the market would look like.

Adam Van Wie 11:25

And these guys, yeah, that's true. If the, if the Mag 7 was still leading the way forward and everyone else was performing like this, we would see another, who knows, 20% year.

Joey Loss 11:37

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Joey Loss 11:40

So of the S&P 493, everybody but the Mag 7, over 60% of companies are outperforming the index itself.

Adam Van Wie 11:47

Wow.

Joey Loss 11:48

That's great.

Adam Van Wie 11:49

That's a— I love that.

Joey Loss 11:52

Um, energy and industrials are doing well. Not shocking given current, uh, environment. Uh, financials, financials are doing well. Banks are contributing heavily to index stability. Um, and then

Joey Loss 12:08

yeah, Brent crude is just kind of this drag. It'll be interesting to see what happens to consumer discretionary. Throughout the rest of the year, if certain things like oil and gas stay high, I just wonder if we're going to see impact in retail behavior.

Adam Van Wie 12:24

Maybe. I don't know. It depends because so much, it seems like so much of retail behavior right now is driven by people who are invested in the Mag 7

Joey Loss 12:24

It hasn't happened yet.

Adam Van Wie 12:38

and are wealthier than they've ever been before. And so a little bit of price difference on retail goods is not going change those consumers' behaviors, but it will affect a lot of other people. So will that show up in the data eventually? We keep looking for it and we keep not finding it. So I think it'll be one of the most interesting storylines to follow in the next year or so.

Joey Loss 13:05

Yeah. Yeah, I think so.

Joey Loss 13:09

And according to this sort of research thing I pulled together, Over 83% of S&P 500 companies have beaten their first quarter earnings per share estimates.

Adam Van Wie 13:18

That's, that's a great number. Yeah. That is off the charts. Good.

Joey Loss 13:20

That is 83.

Joey Loss 13:23

67. Yeah. And we've been elevated for a while. You'd think there'd be a reversion to the mean at some point in the 67 range, but golly, it's going up.

Joey Loss 13:37

Um,

Joey Loss 13:40

Let's see. So we've got inflation. Inflation is kind of creeping up, but the inflation measures in a moment like this always kind of bother me. Can you comment on that?

Adam Van Wie 13:49

Yeah, it's, I mean, it's creeping up. The PCE hit 3.5%.

Adam Van Wie 13:55

It's not historically really that bad, but has it had time to really, it's such a slow buildup. To inflation because of the price of oil. I don't know when we will see every— if, if, if this stays, if oil stays the same price for the next year, at what point will we see peak inflation, um, from due to oil prices? It could be 6 months, it could be 8 months. I, I'm not sure, but it takes a long time for that to build up, and then it takes a long time for it to unwind. And so you've got this arbitrary point in time you're looking at that really isn't giving you the full picture yet. And so where will we see it peak? I honestly, I don't know. And if it comes back down quickly, maybe the peak is in the next month. I, it's so hard to tell with inflation because you just don't know how long those prices take to filter through the whole supply chain and how much is getting passed on the consumer, how much is getting eaten by companies. It's, it's a really difficult thing. Remember that over the last 100 years, the average inflation has been about 3%. So seeing a 3.5% read is not terrible. This arbitrary target that we've set in the last 10 years of 2%, I've never bought it. I still don't buy it today. I hope the new Fed chair addresses that and changes it back to 3%. That's where it should be. So I just think that seeing a 3.5%, yes, it's going the wrong direction, but it could also be a blip, a temporary phenomenon due to the price of oil that comes back down, or it could be building to something much greater. We just don't know yet.

Joey Loss 15:47

Yeah. And I think there's events yet that will determine a lot of that. I mean, we've got a blockade going right now and the Strait of Hormuz. And, you know, it is— I saw an article this week in the Wall Street Journal. I think we were talking about it at the office where Iran has so much oil that they can't move, that they're finding old, like, dirty barrels and just throwing it in there because— and so, you know, one of the things that could happen that's sort of a strategic asset of the United States, but also not so great for oil prices, is, you know, if that pressure remains on Iran, then they might have to shut down some of their wells. And shutting down wells is a whole thing, and getting them back online is a whole thing. It's something they don't want to do. Again, this makes it sort of a strategic play for the US trying to get negotiations in our direction, but also it can have very negative impacts on oil prices just because it'll shock supply further.

Adam Van Wie 16:43

Yeah, it's a, it's absolutely a pressure campaign by the US to, to try to get an outcome that is favorable to us. And so I understand why we're doing it, but you're right, it could have longer-term repercussions on oil prices. So it's a delicate sort of game they're playing. And I don't know how quickly they can resolve it. If they were to open up outbound shipping for oil in Iran, could they avoid shutting down wells at this point? I don't know how far along they are. Into that process where maybe we couldn't even relieve the pressure quick enough. So we might be past the point of no return.

Joey Loss 17:25

Yeah, we might be. And I don't imagine that's information they're going to be forthcoming about.

Adam Van Wie 17:29

Oh, of course not. I don't think that the US would release it and I certainly don't— and Iran definitely wouldn't release that.

Joey Loss 17:34

Yeah. Well, that thought and inflation ties into kind of the Fed's new direction, which is just sort of not doing anything, which is a tilt towards hawkishness from where we were. Obviously, the beginning of the year, we saw mortgage rates touch below 6% for the 30-year, which was something everybody was excited to see. Once the conflict picked up,

Joey Loss 18:02

immediately the market shot over 6% again for the 30-year mortgage. And I think it's expected that rates will pretty much hold until there's more information and confidence about what inflation looks like going forward and how energy prices play into that.

Adam Van Wie 18:18

Yeah, unfortunately for homebuyers, I agree with that. But for savers, that's good news. Your, your high-yield savings accounts will continue to pay in the 3s most likely for a while. Um, it's, uh, that's always a double-edged, uh, coin or double-edged sword. And it's,

Adam Van Wie 18:37

of course, lots of people, especially young people, want rates to come down. It's good for the stock market. It's great for valuations. It's great for buying things, financing things. But, but again, there should be, there has to be an equilibrium because, because savers and lenders want to keep those rates somewhat high. It's better for, for investors who are buying fixed income products. So I don't know. I think that, I think that the Fed actually is on the right path right now. I don't think that they should be raising or lowering lowering rates. I think that they need to wait and see the outcome of the situation in Iran before really make a decision about what happens next. So I didn't have any problem with the meeting this week and neither did the market. Usually there's a lot more volatility around Fed meetings than there was this time.

Joey Loss 19:29

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. I think they have to just hang tight and wait for more clarity. You don't want to give up the dry powder by lowering rates right now if we need it later.

Adam Van Wie 19:43

Exactly.

Joey Loss 19:44

Yeah. And so, just like looking at the whole picture here and seeing that the market's up and everything else that we talked about is true, this year has just been a tale of American market resilience. I just can't get past it. I mean, emerging markets are also doing well. Developed markets started strong. They've kind of fallen behind, but small and large companies in the US are just really showing up. And I know we've talked a lot in the past about how

Joey Loss 20:13

the departure from manufacturing as a core piece of America's public company economy and market has a lot of negative consequences. We've seen those consequences play out over the last few years as having vertically integrated businesses really mattered after COVID. and during certain conflicts like the present. But there are advantages to having a technologically based economy, and one of them is it can keep growing and doing what they do kind of independent of energy shocks to the system because it's just the nature of technology. We're seeing that in the markets as a real advantage today. I just wanted to point it out.

Adam Van Wie 20:53

Yeah, that's interesting. Um, it's not something I would have thought of as a reason to invest in the tech sector. But the insulation they have from things like that is— it's very real because they just aren't— oil affects so much. I mean, almost any industrial company,

Adam Van Wie 21:20

any, any manufacturing company, any— just so many parts of the industry, even food. Like grocery stores are affected by oil because they have such huge transportation costs. It's— it really touches almost everything but— except for maybe Netflix. I don't know. It's— it's just they're really insulated. So that's an interesting point.

Joey Loss 21:43

Yeah. And then, of course, independent of virtually everything is semiconductors who just cannot be stopped.

Adam Van Wie 21:51

Yeah. And that's just this infrastructure buildout for AI. And I don't see that slowing down anytime soon.

Joey Loss 21:59

Yeah, and that, that story has now expanded to memory like DRAM, which, uh, like companies like Micron, they've just exploded. Um, but yeah, hardware is the name of the game. And, and, uh, maybe we should wrap up with, speaking of hardware, just a comment about Apple's new CEO being a hardware guy. I thought that was pretty interesting.

Adam Van Wie 22:21

That was interesting. The whole, uh, the whole The whole process was pretty interesting. Tim Cook is a pretty iconic CEO. He's responsible for more market cap creation than just maybe than anyone or just about anyone in history. And that's really saying something following someone like Steve Jobs. So that's usually the guy who follows the guy is not any good. And so for him to do what he did was pretty incredible.

Joey Loss 22:56

Yeah, and I'm pulling up a chart right now because I heard it discussed this week, but just to put in perspective how monolithic Apple is and how significant the iPhone is,

Joey Loss 23:09

um, I was looking at this chart and, and they were talking about it on the pod, one of the podcasts that you and I listen to pretty frequently, and The iPhone revenue for the last 12 months was considerably larger, almost double Nvidia's total revenue. That's— Nvidia is now one of the biggest companies in the world. Just from, you know, from one product. And it's a product that people have criticized over and over as just not really doing anything that significant to make the product better. Yeah, doesn't matter. People love their iPhones and they're not going to get rid of them. I mean, you got to give a CEO and a company credit for making something that good.

Adam Van Wie 23:27

That is crazy.

Adam Van Wie 23:46

Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't buy anything else. I'm guilty.

Joey Loss 23:49

Yeah, same.

Joey Loss 23:52

They do have some interesting new stuff coming, like a foldable iPhone, and I think they're taking another stab at some kind of glasses product. So we'll see if those are wins or flops.

Adam Van Wie 24:03

Yeah. So apparently the new CEO was against a bunch of the flops that they've had in the past too. So he's got a track record of having a pretty good instinct about what products will work.

Joey Loss 24:15

Yeah. Yep. All right. Well, Adam, anything else you think we should share with people for now?

Adam Van Wie 24:21

Yeah. I just wanted to remind people that if you are a balanced investor and you have a portfolio of both stocks and bonds, those bonds really haven't helped you much this year. They've been basically flat year to date. The AGG is up 19 basis points through yesterday. Really just not doing much of anything. But remember that we're coming off an over 7% year in bonds. And I would say that despite the recent uptick in inflation, that the bias going forward is still probably towards lower rates at some point. And so just hang on. I do think— I don't think bonds, they might be a little bit stagnant right now, but I do think that their time is coming after a pretty good year last year. I don't think it's repeat of 2022 where you just saw bond funds crater. So hang in there and you're going to see that side perform at some point in the future.

Joey Loss 25:24

Yeah. And if we see equity volatility again, you'll be glad to have them. Definitely. Even if they're not performing, they're just doing their job.

Adam Van Wie 25:31

Paying you the steady income and the NAV staying relatively stable.

Joey Loss 25:38

Right. Good deal. Well, uh, as is always the case, I'm sure we'll have a whole bunch of new things to talk about in a couple weeks. But as always, thanks, Adam, for your time. I appreciate it.

Adam Van Wie 25:47

Thanks for having me on, Joey.

Joey Loss 25:49

Awesome.