What really matters is…

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Here’s today’s report.

Six years ago, here’s what I wrote for Trading With Cody subscribers:

Budget and debt ceiling crises!

April 14, 2011

I was asked yesterday to comment on the budget and debt ceiling “crises” by a subscriber who wondered why I hadn’t been talking much about them and how they could affect our portfolio.  After all, those two topics are typically dominating the business pages and business TV shows these days.

The reason I’ve been mostly ignoring those headlines in our trading and analysis is simply because the budget problems and debt ceiling constraints are meaningless distractions.   Let’s quantify some relative macroeconomic numbers and you can see for yourself why we need to stay focused on the big numbers and not the little numbers in both our macroeconomic and in our geopolitical analysis:

$38 billion budget cut debates or $600 billion QE2?   Debt ceiling crisis of a few hundred billion or $14 trillion total spent on bank bailouts and guarantees in the last 36 months?

At any rate, earnings reports are indeed what are drive our stocks.

Google reports…

Topline at $6.54 billion is about 5% better than consensus.

Bottomline at $4.04 per share is inline  versus the $4.05 consensus.  The media will call it a miss, but it’s not. It’s in-line.

Cody back in real-time 2017 now. Fast-forward to today and the headlines are full of discussions about the government running out of money because of yet another debt ceiling crises…along with Trump’s probable-to-be-proposed tax cuts for giant corporation and its expected impact on the deficit…

Additionally, in the six years since I wrote that post above that included that Google earnings report, Google’s earnings have more than quadrupled while revenues have more than tripled. The stock? Driven by earnings over the last five years, has gone from $270 at the time I wrote that to its current all-time high of $868 as I type this today.

Let’s not get distracted with headlines and promised booms or busts and crises and rallies. Earnings are what really matter so let’s keep finding companies that have Revolutionary earnings power.