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Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in 10 minutes. My name is Zadod Mani, and Today is Thursday, April 30th. In today's episode, we'll recap Jerome Powell's last meeting as Fed chair. We'll also recap earnings from Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Meta, then stick around to the end of the show to find out why most traders on prediction markets are losing money. We got a great show for you today. Let's go. Wednesday was a weird day on Wall Street. The S P 500 barely budged, dropping less than a tenth of a percent. And the NASDAQ was basically flat too, but did technically finish in the green energy was once again the best performing sector because oil prices keep surging. Brent crude sprite to $126 a barrel overnight, which is a new wartime high, before pulling back a bit this morning to around $116. The other big market moving event yesterday was the Fed meeting. It was Jerome Powell's last meeting. As as expected, the Fed held rates steady at three and a half to 3.75%. But what nobody expected was the level of internal disagreement. There were four members at the Fed that dissented the most since 1992. Three regional Fed presidents wanted to drop the language, hinting that rate cuts are still on the table. And then on the other side, you have Steven Moran, who dissented because he actually wanted a rate cut. So Kevin Warsh is going to be inheriting a pretty divided Fed when he takes over as fed chair on May 15. The other big headline from this meeting was that Jerome Powell announced that he was staying on as Fed governor. See, typically the Fed chair doesn't stay on the Fed board after their term. But Jerome Powell basically said the legal pressure from the Trump administration left him no choice. So he plans to stay on until that is fully resolved. We got a lot of earnings to get through today, so we'll talk more about Jerome Powell's decision in tomorrow's episode. Let's run through some headlines and we're talking big tech earnings. Four big tech companies reported earnings last night. Let's start with Google's parent company, Alphabet, because they absolutely crushed it. Alphabet reported $110 billion in revenue for the first quarter, which was up 22% from a year ago. That's the fastest growth rate for the company in any quarter since 2022. The star of the show was Google Cloud, which brought in $20 billion in revenue, which is up 63% from a year ago. What's wild to me is that Google Cloud grew 48. So growth in Google cloud is accelerating, which is crazy at this scale. CEO Sundar Pichai said that cloud revenue would have been even higher, but they can't build data centers fast enough to meet the demand. The backlog has nearly doubled to $460 billion, which is basically contracts that have been signed, but they haven't turned into revenue yet. Google said that enterprise AI adoption became the primary growth driver for cloud, with Gemini enterprise paid monthly active users growing 40% quarter over quarter. So yeah, Gemini quietly crushing it. The other big takeaway from the earnings is that search just keeps growing. Investors at one point were worried that I would eat into Google's search business, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Google search revenue grew 19% to $60 billion last quarter and search queries actually hit an all time high. Now on the spending side, Google raised its 2026 capex forecast. They're now expecting to spend up to $190 billion this year on AI infrastructure, and the CFO said that 2027 will be significantly higher. On top of that, Google said they're going to start selling their custom TPU chips directly to a select group of customers and not just through the cloud. So I got to say, Google seems to be firing on all cylinders right now, which explains why Google stock is up more than 8% this morning and back at all time highs. Next up, let's talk Amazon, because they also had a monster quarter. Total revenues in Q1 came in at $181 billion, which was up 6.17%. And just like Google, the cloud business was the bright spot. Aws revenue hit $37.6 billion, which was up 28% from a year ago. That's the fastest AWS has grown in nearly four years. So AWS's growth is accelerating again, likely due to AI. And that's exactly what investors wanted to see. They want to see that all that AI capex spending is paying off. CEO Andy Jassy said that Amazon's AI business alone is on pace to bring in $15 billion this year. And and that Amazon has also locked in massive commitments from both OpenAI and Anthropic to use Amazon's custom Trainium chips with over $225 billion in total revenue commitments for that chip line. Beyond Cloud and AI, Amazon's ad business grew 24% to $17.2 billion. And then online sales grew 12% as well. So basically every part of Amazon's business is crushing it right now. Now on the spending side capex hit $44 billion in Q1 alone. And for the full year, Amazon expects to spend around $200 billion. That is a 56% increase from last year. And all that aggressive spending is showing up in their free cash flow, which dropped to just $1.2 billion over the last 12 months. A year ago, free cash flow was $26 billion. So Amazon is basically spending every dollar it makes to build out AI infrastructure. Amazon stock has had a wild ride after hours. IT initially dropped 5% when the earnings first came out, but then rallied during the earnings call. The stock is currently sitting up 4% at the time of this recording. Now let's move to Microsoft. Their numbers look pretty solid on paper. Revenue was up 18% to $82.9 billion, and the Azure cloud revenue grew 40%, slightly ahead of estimates. The problem for Microsoft, though, is that their cloud growth rate has stayed flat, while both Google and Amazon are seeing an acceleration of their cloud growth. You know, Azure grew 39% last quarter. It's up to 40% this quarter. So not a meaningful improvement, especially when you compare that to Amazon and Google. So that doesn't paint a great picture of Microsoft's AI momentum. Now, speaking of Microsoft's AI strategy, they did say that Copilot has 20 million paying users now, up from 15 million last quarter. Personally, I don't know anyone that actually willingly uses Copilot, but CEO Satya Nadella said that weekly engagement on Copilot is now on par with Outlook. Overall, though, annualized AI revenue across the company hit a 37 billion run rate, which is more than double from a year ago. On the spending side, Microsoft says that total capex for 2026 will hit $190 billion, which is up 61% from last year. And apparently 25 billion of that increase is just from higher component costs like memory chips, which are experiencing a supply crunch right now. But yeah, Microsoft's numbers overall are great, but there just seems to be no momentum or hype around the company or the stock price. Shares are down around 2% this morning. And then there is Meta. Headline numbers for the company were solid. Revenue was up 33% to $56 billion, which is Meta's biggest revenue increase in nearly five years, driven almost entirely by their ad business, which continues to benefit from AI powered targeting and recommendation. But despite that, Meta stock is getting crushed, down nearly 10% this morning. And it could be because of Meta's capex. The company raised their capex forecast to up to $145 billion. For the year, blaming the increase on higher component costs for data centers. And unlike Google and Amazon, which can point to cloud revenue as proof that their AI spending is paying off, Meta doesn't have a clear AI revenue story yet outside of helping its ad targeting. And the other red flag was user growth. Daily active users across Meta's apps actually declined, dropping more than 5% from last quarter. Metta blamed that on Internet disruptions in Iran from the war and also restrictions on WhatsApp in Russia. The takeaway for me is that Meta's core ad business business is doing great, but investors are losing confidence in Zuck's AI strategy and second guessing all of that AI spending. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Eli Lilly is surging this Morning after crushing Q1 results this morning thanks to its continued dominance in the GLP1 market. Revenue for the period surged 56 year over year to $19.8 billion. Manjaro and Zepbound sales continue to surge. Together, these two drugs now account for near two thirds of Eli Lilly's total revenue. The company is now raising its full year sales outlook by $2 billion to a range of 82 to 85 billion. Also keep in mind, Eli Lilly started selling a weight loss GLP1 pill called Foundeo in early April, so that's something to keep an eye on moving forward as Eli Lilly tries to expand its 60% share of the GLP1 market. Shares of the company are up more than 7% this morning in reaction to the report. Now on the flip side, shares of the semiconductor company KLA Corp. Are down after delivering revenue guidance that failed to impress Wall Street. KLA makes tools for finding defects during the chip making process, basically quality control for AI chips. And the business is booming right now. But the stock is down 5% today because the stock was already up 50% this year going into this report and investors wanted to see a big beat in strong guidance and they didn't get one. Let's wrap the show with the fun fact most traders on prediction markets are losing money. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, they found that 69 of traders on Polymarket lost money. And the part that blew my mind from this study is that bots are the ones racking up most of the gains. Automated trading accounts make up just 5% of all the wallets on polymarket, but account for 75 of the trading volume and and I've made $131 million in profit. So yeah, it seems like the Algos and bots are taking over prediction markets as well, well. All right, guys, that's the rundown for today. Thank you guys so much for listening, watching, and commenting. Shout out to Mike and Connor for all the work behind the scenes, and we'll see you guys back here tomorrow.