Q3 Results: Tesla Mixed, IBM Beats, Las Vegas Sands Improves

Market indices fought back from an early give-back after its mini-rally this week, but ultimately wound up closing in the red today. Perhaps the roar ahead of 3-4% going back from five trading days ago was due for a trim. The Dow closed -0.32%, the S&P 500 was -0.61% and the Nasdaq -0.85%. The Russell 2000 saw a more significant sell-off on the day, -1.72%.

Quickly, the 10-year Treasury bond yield, which breached 4% yesterday, ramped up to +4.127% today. The 2-year, which had already surpassed this psychological level weeks ago, accelerated to +4.554% today. Consider the Fed funds rate, currently at 3-3.25%: at its next monetary policy meeting, its nearly unanimous that another 75 basis-point (bps) hike, which would bring us to 3.75-4%. These bond yields are now “forecasting” another 50-75 bps hike at the Fed’s December meeting. Worth keeping in mind.

Long-awaited Q3 earnings figures for Tesla TSLA are out after today’s closing bell, posting a mixed overall headline: earnings of $1.05 per share beat the Zacks consensus by a solid dime, while revenues in the quarter of $21.45 billion missed the expected $22.32 billion. Operating cash flow in the quarter reached $3.3 billion; operating margin came in at 17.2%.

Today’s conference call is likely to be discussing weakness in Tesla’s China market — the company’s largest operating venue, but one that has been marred by Covid shutdowns and subsequent economic anemia. Also, for the first time, we may hear CEO Elon Musk field questions related to his pending purchase of Twitter TWTR, and whether he would be required to sell more shares of Tesla to finalize that deal.

Tesla saw a +30% increase in gross margins including emissions credits, but only +26.8% without those credits — below what analysts were expecting. This may explain the -6% sell-off of Tesla shares in late trading (but ahead of the conference call), which now puts the vaunted EV leader -50%+ from its peak trading highs. Hopefully Musk will be able to soothe his investors’ fears; he’s done so several times in the past.

IBM Corp. IBM also posted A# results this afternoon, and the Big Tech staple outperformed on both top and bottom lines: earnings of $1.81 per share outpaced the Zacks consensus by 3 cents — though this was downwardly guided from $1.91 per share previously — on $14.11 billion in revenues, which bettered the $13.73 billion analysts were predicting. Full-year revenue guidance was also bumped up; shares are +5% in the after-market.

Las Vegas Sands LVS continues its comeback story, albeit rather slowly: a bottom-line loss of -27 cents per share was 7 cents lower than consensus, while revenues tipped the billion-scale to $1.01 billion in the quarter, above the anticipated $975 million. Its Singaporean Marina Bay Sands rebounded nicely, while results from Macau show lower losses than predicted. Shares were flat-to-low ahead of the Q3 report, and that’s where they remain at his hour.

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