We're going to talk about earnings calls because we get a lot of insights from these and I'm going to give you the bottom lines on four big ones. We're going to start with Starbucks and we're going to go into Apple, Amazon and Qualcomm and what we're going to be looking for are hints because these are all companies that just reported two days ago and we want to look for hints of how is China doing? How quickly is China going to rebound because the faster China rebounds, the more oil prices and commodity prices might end up bouncing and the more risk we have of potentially an inflationary second wave or inflationary shock, right? So I was trying to doing is one thing we want to look at. What's it like hiring people? Is it getting easier or harder to hire people? What are we expecting in terms of a bottom for earnings per share? And where is the real pain in this market? Let's find out. and I think one of the best ways to do that is regularly studying earnings calls because you get insight, leading hints.

They don't want to say like leading warnings because CEOs don't like to sandbag their own company share prices, but let's just say you end up getting hints and those hints end up being sort of a liability preservation method to make sure they can look back and go. Yeah, well, we did warn you so we'll go ahead again. We'll start with Starbucks and then we'll get into Apple Amazon Qualcomm Let's get started first. Starbucks And speaking of Starbucks, it's time for a sip of coffee.

Um, that is some delicious Kirkland brand coffee that unfortunately I have let sit too long and now it's room temperature so it's not that great actually. Anyway, what do we have here? So we we start with China The first thing Starbucks tells us about China is that a lot of their employees have already been infected and they're actually now back to work. What's very interesting though is the customer base is not actually running back to the stores. This was a surprise to me.

I Thought that after the reopening, we would have somewhat of a United States kind of return to everybody kind of. All of a sudden in boom, we're going back outside and going uh, uh, you know, basically eating, uh, right back into normal daily life. uh with a lot of excitement. Well what Starbucks is noticing is a gradual return to Starbucks's I Was surprised by that.

I Thought we were going to get a lot faster of a return. so the reopening is not as uh Jerome Powell even puts it. it's not like a light switch, it's it's this more soft and gradual return that we're seeing at Starbucks which is actually good if you think about it because you don't want inflationary pressure to come all at once. Now they mentioned this a few times throughout the earnings called that the return in China.

While they are very bullish on it and they expect the eventual return to be very good and strong for Starbucks, it's not going to come all at once. it's going to come substantially, uh, gradually, and uh, really, just over time. And then we have now a total of 3.3 billion dollars in gift cards loaded up at Starbucks. It's worth noting that gift cards about 10 to 15 percent of gift cards are never used, never used.

So think about that. If a company sells a gift card for a hundred dollars, the company's looking at that and basically saying to 10 to 15 bucks of basically a donation. So if you ever buy gift cards in your life, realize that you're basically donating 10 to 15 percent of the value of that card to the company. So uh, Starbucks and China they're expected to get up to 9 000 stores in China by 2025.

Now this is really remarkable growth. In fact, one of the things that I did is I looked back at 2018 and how many stores uh Starbucks had and in 2018 they had 3 521 Chinese stores. In the third quarter of 2022, they had 5 368 stores. Now this was really remarkable because think about that over the covet pandemic.

Basically, through the lockdowns, they ended up growing their store Base by 52 in China. But this was even more remarkable in 2018 Starbucks had 15 341 Global stores in Q3 2022 they had 17 133.. Now I'm not expecting you to do the mental math on that, but let me give you what I'm getting at. They added 1792 stores in those four years, but guess what a net? 97 of the stores they added were in China That's wild.

So in other words, during the three years of Covid lockdown, they blew up their focus on China and in Q3 of last year they were sitting at 5 358 stores today. which is just like two quarters later, they're at six thousand one hundred stores. So another 700 Plus stores On top of that. and by 2025, they expect to again grow Chinese stores by another 50, going from six thousand one hundred to nine thousand stores by 2025..

that means the next two years they're going to build about 3 000 stores in China. If you are investing in Starbucks you are going all in on China's recovery. It's actually very interesting because personally, I think there's less risk investing in a company like Starbucks to get Chinese exposure then investing directly into Chinese companies that have a potential risk of getting feed listed in America Kind of interesting. Now listen to why you go to the earnings call and they literally tell you they say our customers in China are creating a full return familiar, pre-pandemic or returning to routines from pre covet and they believe, uh, that China is basically a huge set of customer demand waiting to be Unleashed So I mean this.

This is pretty bullish on China here. Early indicators are that the beginning is starting to happen in the largest cities now with many Chinese recovered from Covet people returning to work, border and travel restrictions lifted mall traffic, and Retail Store activity on the rise and consumers reintroducing social activity back into their daily lives. We are expecting the second half of fiscal 2023 in China to be stronger than the first half, but uncertainties remain and we remain cautious in the short term. So in other words, again, they're super super super bullish on China.

But they're also trying to like moderate our expectations that we're not going to go basically from Zero to Hero in one quarter, that it's probably going to be more towards the second half of the year that we actually start seeing. Uh, this this build out. Now keep in mind the second half of the Year part because when we look at some of the other earnings calls, you're going to learn a lot about the second half of the year. but I'll tell you they think they are in the early chapters of Growth for China and I mean it makes sense when they're expecting to grow their stores by another 50 percent.

Really remarkable. So I was very impressed with that. Uh, Now another thing that I thought was interesting here is they talk about how they gained productivity by uh by basically rolling out more uh and and higher quality or better equipment. And they think they're going to see margin expansion in the second half of the year and More in future years to come now.

I Know this is Starbucks but I have a very strong thesis and I continue to see it get reiterated. So I am looking for signs that I'm wrong. Don't get me wrong. I I Don't like confirmation bias but I really have this thesis that Supply chains are like a rubber band when covet hit.

that rubber band stretched out really really far and in many cases snapped. and now companies are like what the heck. We never want to be in a situation again where we can't fulfill the crazy demand that we have. And so now companies are investing more and more into equipment including Uh Starbucks.

But even like look at the chip manufacturers, the chip manufacturers is the perfect example for you. The chip manufacturer uh or or the chip equipment manufacturer Basically the company that makes the machines that make chips a the big one for advanced manufacturing is called Asml. They've got like a 90 market share on the advanced chip making equipment. Market You can invest in them I I Have exposure to Asml myself.

it's a Dutch company so that company is actually expecting at the same time as PC Sales are plummeting like 32 percent year over year and memory demand is in the trash. Uh Samsung's Samsung reported Revenue declines the 69 Tsmc slowed production Nvidia AMD and Qualcomm are all complaining about high inventory sitting on shelves at stores at the same time as that's happening. Guess what Asml says The equipment manufacturer. They expect growth of 25 I'm like what you guys are still growing.

Yeah, it's because the chip manufacturers. While they realize inventory is high, they're actually still investing in equipment because they know when that next demand wave comes. After we get through this nonsense of a recession or whatever it is we're going through right now, this economic contraction. They want to be prepared to fulfill that demand.

So I have this belief that Supply chains are basically a scrunchied up rubber band right now and when we actually reopen, whether it's with China or or you know, China and the US whatever, the market going back to normal Supply chains are ready to absorb it. They're so ready to absorb it. Try, try to try to break a rubber band that's scrunchied up I Like, you have to stretch it pretty far. Certainly a lot further than you would if it started unscrunchied up, right? So this is really where companies are actually saying, hey, look, we're going to invest in all this equipment, but we're not actually even turning it on yet.

That's hence the scrunchy idea, right? Like we have all that potential. But we're actually purposefully compressing that potential right now because we don't yet have all the demand. but we're ready from a supply side Even Starbucks is talking talking about that, right? We'll see more of that anyway. So they do expect to see this: this slower reopening and trying to lead to some more pressure going into their Q2 which is really January to March for them.

Uh, in January Uh, China's comp sales were still down about 15 year over year, which is a lot better than the 42 percent they were down before. Again, this is this is going to be gradual for China but it's still very, very exciting. Uh, they talk about China probably contributing positively to their margins. By uh, the second half or end of the year, they're expected to continue with dividends and BuyBacks at Starbucks which is pretty attractive to investors.

and, uh, excluding China they talk about enormous growth. They also talk about the following: They say uh China performed even better than we thought. And so what we're seeing now with 25 growth is growth, overgrowth, and performance over performance. And we are expecting in some markets to see the economy inflation slow or or were expecting.

Okay, let me rephrase this because they said it in a funky way. So basically they're seeing tremendous growth at Starbucks and they thought that people would end up spending less money on Starbucks drinks. Uh, because of the inflation, right? that the world economies have seen. But they've actually seen the opposite.

If anything, they've seen substantial growth in spite of all of the inflation. uh, that uh that we've been experiencing. which I thought was quite remarkable, especially since when we look at Amazon's call, you're going to see that Amazon's kind of like yeah, consumers are uh, choosing cheaper stuff now uh and uh, and less. Um, you know, less high margin stuff for us Starbucks isn't seeing that? Uh, so yeah.

See, look at that here. They literally say it here at a time when people are generally trading down and there's a lot of discounting going on. We've actually had the highest average price per ticket and we don't see a situation where our customers are trading down. Uh, now look.

I I Know there's the thesis that companies could just be lying to, but they don't do that in the earnings calls. Uh, generally. I Mean, don't get me wrong, they like they will Dodge questions. but that's where you want to be careful when companies Dodge questions.

that's usually where they're hiding. stuff is the it's in the Dodge But when they do say stuff, they expose themselves to massive liability if if they straight up lie. So generally you won't get lies in our next calls. you'll get Dodges And it's often the Dodges you want to pay attention to.

There weren't many uh that I actually noticed in Starbucks Starbucks was very, very bullish. Now don't get me wrong, they're like, you know they're not like super cheap okay as a stock right now and I don't have any exposure to Starbucks myself. but it's very interesting, even just from the point of view of trying to understand what's going on in the economy. I Mean right now Starbucks is trading for about 32 times on a PE basis? Uh, now they're expected to grow substantially.

especially with that Chinese exposure. They could potentially expand. Uh, you know their EPS by about 18 per year. Those are the current estimates.

but still, that puts you around. uh, you know, 1.7 times Peg So so it's not like you're getting this crazy deal invested in Starbucks right now. but uh, I don't know. I'm very excited about at least what I'm hearing here in the very early stages of our recovery.

All right, let's see here, let's keep going. Where are some other meats we do? Oh yeah, yeah, this was interesting. So I'm always interested. especially after all of this crazy labor report that we just had where a lot of people are saying oh no, we're gonna have massive wage inflation.

Oh no. Jerome Powell's gonna rug pull us because jobs came in hot. Look the the January seasonal adjustments for jobs is so ludicrous. It doesn't surprise me that economists couldn't get it right.

I Mean economists so far have been wrong and wrong and wrong and wrong. Like almost every single data release this one they just happened to be off by a factor of eight standard deviations. But that's in part because every January you get a substantial amount of layoffs, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics throws in a seasonal adjustment of oftentimes like three million jobs where they're like, okay, the first three million jobs will just pretend those didn't exist, just to give you an idea of of how the labor market sort of works. So for example, if the labor Department's like we're going to assume we lost 3 million jobs to, uh, you know, for seasonal effects and then all of a sudden they do the numbers and they're like, oh, it looks like we only lost 2.9 Now it's kind of like you had a hundred thousand job gains report once you factor in that seasonal adjustment, right? Well, if they come in and say Hey, you know this season we think we only lost 2.6 million jobs jobs, right, And and the numbers substantially off from that because their estimate was bad because more businesses retained employees.

which is exactly what happened. What happens, You get this crazy labor report that nobody could have predicted substantially, in part because of weird seasonal adjustments that are pretty arcane and difficult to understand exactly the method behind all the January Madness. But uh, not a lot of people are really super concerned in the finance space about uh, the January report, because januaries are very commonly weird. But not only that, we know that Chipotle is talking about low, lower turnover I've mentioned that like 17 times on the channel, so sorry for being redundant.

but I think it's great because if you think about it, you've got a substantial uh, a lack of pricing pressure from employees at companies like Chipotle and these are the ones growing, right? The Retail: Hospitality Restaurants travel. Those are the sectors growing so we want to see less wage pricing pressures in the services sector. Well, guess what? Starbucks does services and guess what? Starbucks Just said: we do not have any labor shortage issue and we're ready to rock and roll in hiring more people for our new store openings. Great! I Don't see any issue at all with our hiring or are people staying with Starbucks This is fantastic because if people again are changing jobs a lot, you have a problem because you could potentially Drive wages up a lot and training costs go through the Moon but now you get Chipotle and Starbucks Reiterating they're not having the labor problem that they used to have which is great and so they're seeing their turnover substantially reduce.

and they're also listen to this. we continue to. despite record low unemployment, we continue to see and experience strong and consistent overall applicant flow to support our store hiring with typical seasonality. This is fantastic.

This is really great news. We Additionally, on inflation, we're seeing inflation elevated relative to years prior uh, to fiscal 22, but we're starting to see it soften slightly. That's great so we don't have expectations that we will have to further increase prices. This is also fantastic.

We don't want to hear that businesses are pulling off what they did in January of 2022 where everybody's like we're raising prices because we can. We have unlimited elasticity of demand, so we will raise prices. Uh, instead here Starbucks expects to see prices normalized towards the back half of the year. Uh, and Starbucks also mentions that Uh, well, okay, that's just a reiteration of prices moderating.

So here, just just in Starbucks we got a lot of insights about China inflation and wages. Really insightful in my opinion. I'm very excited about all of this Insight because it doesn't make me nervous about the markets and I'd like to read all the information I can to see am I missing something Should I be being nervous, right? Am I Am I blinding myself biasing myself thinking uh, maybe you know I'm in the market so I just need to look at everything through those colored glasses I Don't think so because again, we're seeing this reiteration significantly And it's not just the chips, but it's also companies like Apple Look at this. so Apple obviously blamed their uh, their iPhone Miss on supply chain issues and uh, we.

And then they also talk about how the iPads beat because Supply chains came back uh and and people were actually able to buy iPads again. but uh, they talk about how the macro economic environment in the past quarter was much more challenging than it was 12 months ago. In other words, at the same time as they experienced supply chain shortages for their iPhone, the market is clearly one where people are spending a little bit less. Uh, I Mean that's obvious? Uh, people are taking on more debt, so people were getting squeezed a lot more.

A lot of folks still trying to support their existing spending habits. Uh, certainly. But uh, let's let's see what kind of forward-looking data we can get from Apple Here from a supply chain point of view says: Tim Cook We're now at a point where production is where we need it to be and so the problem is behind us. Now that's actually quite interesting to see.

Tim Cook mentioned. Look, it's over. We had a supply chain issue. Now it's over, and now we think we have a very resilient supply chain in aggregate.

That's good. That's again reiterating the scrunchy analogy uh of of uh Supply chains and Apple is clearly seeing those. but there's also more that Apple gives us. Apple talks about India and I Thought this was neat.

They talk about India being a hugely exciting market for us and a major Focus Now Apple is trying to get some of their manufacturing and assembly out of China and India seems to be one of those places a lot of companies are going, so you really want to potentially start paying attention to India as an Emerging Market a bit. obviously you've got that massive adani Scandal that's that's making people quite fearful about India. But anyway, uh I Thought this was fascinating. So they're talking about how they basically see India as the next China and they're taking what they learned in China how they scaled in China and bringing that to India.

Now another thing that I thought was really neat is Apple reiterates how excited they are about being the largest customer for Taiwan semiconductors and they expect to continue to be the largest customer for Taiwan semiconductors in Arizona. Now the reason I mentioned that is because a I have exposure to Taiwan semiconductors as a stock. but number two B Uh, I am a big fan of investing in real estate where there are jobs and there are a lot of jobs going into uh, you know, Arizona and Ohio for chip making even Intel Well, a lot of people poop on Intel they've They've been screwing up pretty badly, but the potential of the next three years actually doesn't look that bad. they're they're making some pretty smart changes I'm I'm very impressed and usually I I caution the old companies or just value traps.

but I don't think you can cast everything with the same blanket and uh, you want to keep an eye on an Intel. So anyway, uh, let's see here. this I thought was a fascinating line from Tim Cook Here this is basically an elasticity of uh, demand statement. Here he talks about how basically iPhones have become so integral in people's lives because it contains their contacts, their health information, their banking information, their smart home and everything.

their vehicle blah blah blah blah. and Tim Cook literally says I think people are willing to really stretch to get the best they can afford in the category I mean I Hate to say it, but he's kind of saying we got it. We got Big Peepee and we're proud. I mean it's pretty obvious.

Uh, anyway, they did have weakness and Mac and wearables and the industry is challenged. You know, the industry across the board, especially in PC is Contracting but uh, what's what I think is very interesting about this is you have an analyst who asks, hey, how is the PC industry going to go forward and what do you have right here you have Tim Cook dodging the question basically saying look challenged a lot of uncertainty, not in a position to be able to predict how 2023 is going to go, so not a lot of enthusiasm for the PC market. So something to pay attention to, especially if you're exposed to the peripherals Corsair Logitech or or other companies more specifically, just relying on PCS right? at least when you invest in something like uh, AMD Of course they have a PC segment, but you also have a server segment uh, and an automotive sector. right? You've got.

You've got some balancing effects. The Logitech I I don't think you have as much of a benefit in that. uh, that sort of diversification. Now let's touch on the Apple earnings call.

Uh, sorry, we just did. Apple Let's look at Amazon now. so Amazon was probably one of the the weakest I mean Starbucks and uh Apple Not bad. not bad at all.

But uh Amazon I'm not terribly excited about and you're going to see why we've seen during periods of economic uncertainty, customers are very careful about how they allocate their resources and where they choose to spend money. You get a lot of caution from Amazon a lot. We continue to see inflationary pressures in worldwide stores now. This is sort of in their intro here and that's not great.

We don't like to see that, so we want to see if we can get some more insight. What do they mean on this right? This is in their intro and they see customers shifting to lower cost items so you're really seeing more of the pain at Amazon They also and I thought this was fascinating. just sort of broadly for for companies. Uh, companies are taking large Severance expenses in Q4 and that's because they've laid off a lot of people and those Severance expenses should go away obviously.

uh, as long as they don't lay off more people in future quarters. So it's actually potentially a Tailwind for the future. They also saw productivity improvements and full of fulfillment centers. and Logistics It's worth noting that if you look at the Baltic dry index of Uh freight costs and this is basically how much does it cost to ship stuff over the sea and you can see that massive Spike we had at the end of 2021 and then of course the war Spike We're we're at Lowe's uh of the Baltic uh dry index I Mean we're we're at as low as what we saw during nearly as what we saw during covet, which is actually insane.

uh, to think about so so that's very good for disinflationary forces on Logistics especially when they talk about trying to, uh, improve not only their productivity within their own Logistics But we're trying to see this from a deflation point of view as well. Uh, difficult operating environment, macro environment? Yeah, whatever. Amazon Okay, we continue to believe grocery is a significant opportunity. that's for Amazon I I Personally think that's like a terrible business to be in and relatively low margin.

Do keep in mind that Whole Foods just came out and started talking about the potential for lowering uh, uh, prices at Whole Foods because they've started to see less Supply costs. Uh, and and they want to pass those benefits on to Consumers, It's suggesting that probably a lot of customers are leaving Whole Foods and they're going to Walmart or something cheaper Costco Whatever. Sam's Club And that's not great for Amazon because a business they want to expand in is seeing weakness. So now they're talking about cutting prices substantially.

All right, we'll see Amazon Uh, So then we have the second thing. Okay, this is probably the biggest reason I do Not invest in Amazon I Think they are in a race to basically teleporting Goods to you and that is not a race that I want to invest in because I don't think teleportation is going to be real. But not only am I not going to invest in teleportation I am not going to waste my money investing in companies. My personal opinion: Where those companies are going to take all that money and throw it into trying to get your stupid package to you 30 minutes faster because you're impatient Now don't get me, don't get me wrong, I Love that two-day shipping is becoming one day shipping is becoming uh, same day shipping is becoming three hour shipping and in the future might be drone delivery services.

This is extremely expensive and Amazon here is basically saying look, we're optimizing but yeah, we are going to spend a ton of money making sure we could get Goods to our customers faster because as they say, we believe continuing to get products to customers faster makes customers happier. Okay, we'll keep spending money Amazon I Don't know I Don't know customers right now. very conscious on how much they're spending will continue to be continue to work really hard on being sharp on pricing. Notice the difference between this and the Apple Call in the Apple call you got Tim Cook Who's basically like, yeah, we think the iPhone has huge PP and then here you've got Amazon.

It's like we got tiny PP Um, yeah, we're gonna work on getting this a little sharper. All right. It's pretty obvious the differences between the two so far. Uh, you know.

But then again, I mean when you're comparing companies, it should be pretty obvious who's got a bigger PP You know, And in this case, Apple clearly has a substantially larger set of pricing power than uh than Amazon does. What other notes did we get out of Amazon At Amazon we get advertising lower advertising spend across the board. Not great. A little bit of another red flag there for trade.

This, you know, a lot of red flags on the map for trade desk people. Hope include myself included. The trade desk can continue to grow because you're you're in such a small sector of the digital ad spend. Market You think that maybe there'll actually be a downtrend from a company spending on TV advertising and switching over to connect to TV and that could continue to propel growth in CTV But if companies just reduce their spending across the board, then yeah, you might have some transition over, but you still have less growth.

so not great on AWS growth rate. So this was actually one of the qualms I had with the Amazon uh financial statement is their uh growth rate on AWS was was faltering quite a bit. Uh, and their margins were faltering as well. Uh, and you know I Generally don't like that when you're investing in a company for growth and you're getting margin compression and you're getting slowing at revenues, it's not great.

I actually happen to have that document, so here it is: AWS slowed growth to under 20 and margin compressed 420 basis points. Yoix! All right. So what does Amazon have to say for themselves? Well, they say on AWS growth rate I'm not sure I could forecast for you with any level of certainty what's going to happen Beyond This quarter that's a red flag. Here's a Dodge right? And not only is it a a Dodge, but it's also a red flag because they're like, ah, we can't really tell.

Things are economically uncertain right now and there's some unique things going on with the customer base that we're seeing that we're all seeing the same thing. I Mean this. They literally said that there's some unique things, the grammar is terrible, but whatever, some unique things going on with the customer base that I think many in this industry are all seeing the same. This is like such a massive red flag for Amazon Web services.

but also folks, Cloud cloud SAS This is a huge red flag. Combine that with what service now is saying and The Dumping of the shares huge cloud and SAS red flag right here and look what I wrote on the left here because they say so I don't have a crystal ball on that one, but we're going to continue to work for customers out there. and uh, don't confuse this for saying we have no deals. We do have deals going on.

but anyway I wrote on the left side I Go! Uh, you say you don't have a crystal ball, but you do have January data. Your financial report is only October November and December But here you are on a conference call on February 3rd and you're saying I don't have a crystal ball but you do have January data and you're not giving us any of the January data. All you're saying instead of providing the January Insight is yeah, we don't have a crystal ball. Uh, there's some unique things going on and um, you know, yeah, long term we think things are gonna be good, but uh yeah, there's perhaps some short-term belt tightening.

That's their race. Uh, not great, not great. So so a lot of a lot of pressures here that I I did not like in the Uh Amazon Earnings called. The last one was Qualcomm from the Uh from from earnings calls that we have to go through now.

Qualcomm Ah, okay, I mean streamlining operations more Channel inventory. Uh, they talk about challenging macroeconomic conditions and headwinds in China. But what they do say is they expect a normalization in the second half of the calendar year. Now that's good.

And it's a reiteration that even though things are challenging right now, we do expect that things will settle down in the second half of the year. Now that is something. I get reiterated over and over and over again because here's Qualcomm and they're kind of guiding that things are looking flat for cell phone sales for the March quarter. So like basically, uh, January to March That's not so great for this idea that maybe iPhone sales will pick up again at Apple because Tim Cook's like, oh, our supply chain issues are behind us.

Yeah, well, Qualcomm doesn't think we're seeing a big pickup in phone sales yet. But uh, they do think that January to March is more of a seasonal Decline and they'll get back to gains in the second half of the year. And after those inventory drawdowns, maybe we get back to sort of a positive uh, EPS growth territory by like June and Beyond Uh, They also briefly just mentioned they have a lot of prepayments and this is a little bit of a red flag for the chip makers. They have a lot of prepayments on hand at companies like for example, maybe a Taiwan Semiconductors and they're kind of calling them up and going yeah, maybe don't spend the money yet.

We just don't need that chips yet. so hold on a little bit. it's like oh so yeah. look I Don't see in any of these earnings calls any any at all concerns about wages skyrocketing and labor being a big problem I'm not saying that at all in any of them.

Not only am I not seeing wage pressures, but I'm seeing companies that are like oh man, yep, we we definitely have shrinking PP and uh, you know, some companies doing better than others Starbucks Killing it with pricing power and they're about to blow up things to China Apple Killing it more with pricing power than certainly an Apple or Qualcomm Yeah, but overall, where's the inflation? I'm not really seeing it in these earnings calls. you're just you. Basically the only mention of inflation we had was from Amazon and it was basically them saying the inflation that has happened is still affecting us. but I Kind of think based on the rest of the call from Amazon, that was a slight cop-out from Amazon and that's what companies do like.

Look at Procter Gamble and Johnson Johnson They're like, oh, the inflation was so bad. Well is it gonna get worse? No, we think it's going to get better in the second half of the year. So why are you complaining about inflation? Because our numbers are bad. That's kind of essentially what you had from from those companies.

So worth paying attention to these earnings calls personally. I Think these earnings calls were incredibly insightful and they give me a lot of of, uh, an understanding about what's going on the market now. I I do one at this because I Thought it was quite interesting and it's kind of out of nowhere and kind of a little bit random, but it's a fun fact. Apparently there was a study done in South Korea Seoul South Korea and their National University that apparently our findings suggest that mask wearing has shifted from being a self-protection measure to being a self-presentative presentation tactic.

In other words, pretty people are less likely to wear a mask compared to uglier people who are more likely to wear a mask. That was a study from South Korea It's not me saying it, they're saying it. I Don't know, but I Want to know from you? What do you think? is that possibly true?.