Earnings season continues...

But the reactions are markedly different. Some thoughts on ARLO, INOD, IONQ, and STRL.

It’s amazing at the difference a little thing like the Presidential election can make to the market’s psychology.

At the start of this earnings season companies reacted at least somewhat rationally to their quarterly earnings reports, though with a rather large helping of bull-market foolishness heaped on top of it. The first few names I had in the reporting cycle went down on clear misses and underwhelming guidance while those meeting or beating numbers tended to outperform.

Ever since the election, of course, it’s simply off to the races, with the bulls firmly in control of the narrative for why pretty much every single industry will somehow be able to benefit in the next administration. If a company basically announces numbers in-line and hands out some punk guidance, who really cares if next year everything will be changing?

To fan the flames further, charts are going up everywhere showing the current market reaction compared to what happened back in 2016, with the not-so-subtle message that the party is just getting started and you don’t want to miss out. FOMO tends to be the idea that always brings in the retail investor, so we have indexes like the small and mid-cap Russell 2000 outperforming all of the larger-cap major indexes, and to top it all off (and due to the players involved) we have crypto going along for the ride.

So with the S&P500 already up over 25%, the NASDAQ over 30%, and even the crusty old DOW up 20%, all in space of one year, can there possibly be further for these markets to run? At least in the short term? As they say, markets can stay irrational much longer than a skeptic can stay solvent, so the answer is a solid yes.

Against this backdrop, quite a few of the names on my interest list have made announcements over the past 10 days, so I thought I would put forward a few thoughts.

As usual, I won’t rehash what the company puts out in their press release, but rather with the things that the analyst community chooses not to highlight.

Let’s start with the folks over at ARLO…