Breakfast Bites - Mixed morning

Rise and shine everyone.

While the softer CPI was big news for a minute, this morning everyone’s talking about the 13F Filings that were released yesterday. The hot topic - Buffett taking a position in Ulta and an electronics / defense manufacturer called, Heico.

The other notable mentions have been Burry increasing his stake in Baba, and Ackman taking a sizable position in Nike. A quick look at a few of the 13F’s shows that there are quite a few funds that have taken exposure to China. It’s a tough call here, given where the data is heading (more below).

Back to the CPI data, here’s the heatmap from yesterday. Shelter made the headlines of being sticky, and while we saw a 2-handle on headline inflation, the heatmap looks less green than we’d like. Nevertheless, the data is trending in the right direction.

The macro data of the day is the US Retail Sales release at 8:30 am ET. Given the PPI and CPI prints, I can only imagine that we’re likely to get a softer reading. Too soft a reading and we could be looking at more calls for a recession, again.

A few major earnings this morning - Alibaba, JD.com, Deere and of course, Walmart.

Walmart beat on EPS with inline Revenue. Guidance was mixed. EPS guidance for Q3 was lower than consensus while FY 2025 guidance was raised. The stock is up +6.6%.

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