Maybe Visa (V) wasn't that bad? Maybe Starbucks (SBUX) can make a comeback? There are buyers of Alphabet (GOOG) lurking. I think that Microsoft (MSFT) might be putting in a bottom.
I mention all of these because these were the four plagues that were visited upon the market last week and they are being reassessed on the fly and perhaps being discovered as not as tragic and awful as people thought, not unlike the comeback in IBM (IBM) when it reported a widely panned quarter that turned out, upon further review, to be not that bad,.
First, a bunch of these are help in the Action Alerts PLUS charitable trust and I found the negativity surrounding them a little out of control.
Consider Visa. It gave you a very good quarter. CEO Charlie Scharf doesn't like to overpromise and under-deliver, so I thought he gave you a typically cautious outlook. People took it as gospel and at one point the stock was down four before finishing down just a buck and change. I think that there are flippers who bought the low and they are ringing the register, but that overall it was a decent quarter.
Starbucks is just a fact of high-valuation life, not unlike what I fear from Facebook (FB), another name in the AAP stable.
You just don't get these very expensive stocks to move higher unless they do something extraordinary. It has to be best ever, best ever, best ever and it wasn't. It was just a very good quarter and that's never enough. Now those who want some should just wait until a really bad market day. Patience is required because of a void of data points to move it.
I know Alphabet's a struggle. You should read Michael Wolff's excellent column in USA Today about how the online ad world is really dominated by Facebook and Alphabet and that theme's not been tarnished at all. Then again, Alphabet got overly loved and that explains a ton of what happened. You need the company to really wow you with new product or something that moves the needle because it, like SBUX, has nothing on the horizon to drive it back up except remorse that it shouldn't be down so much.
Microsoft's the toughest. Bad quarter. Don't see a way out of this one unless it does something to bring out value and I don't know what that can be.
But the good news is that people are taking hard look at what's been crushed and that's a good sign for the bull. A constant re-valuation down would be the 2015 way of doing it and that seems to been exorcised, at least for now.
