Seeking Alpha by Adding Beta

Today morning I went for my usual walk to neighborhood Farmer's market - it was pleasant cool spring morning with fog/clouds on the Evergreen hills! After brisk walk rewarded by bagel and Cappuccino, started thinking of last week's flurry of earnings results by tech giants, potential seizure of First Republic by FDIC and general direction of economy...that's the premise of this blog! Last two weeks tech giants except Apple and Nvidia have reported. Here is quick report-card Tesla: OK but markets did not like constant price cuts to stimulate demand Alphabet: Earnings were good especially with GCP reporting profits first time. Google Cloud is about 11-12% of revenues and 25% of cost but growing at 20-30%. Clearly established itself as 3rd option. Markets would have preferred more clarity on cost cutting and plans to get into leadership position in Generative AI. So stock reaction was muted Microsoft: It delivered on all fronts with Azure still growing at 27%, buzz with OpenAI

First quarter of 2023 is over and it was quite an interesting one with so many unexpected events...almost similar to first quarters of past few years...Markets don't like unpexcted events - so it was surprising that with so many expected events, markets did pretty well especially Nasdaq with double digit gains. What's in store for rest of 2023...for that let's look at some ABC...factors! A I: ChatGPT and followup GPT-4 captured the imagination of world in just few months and revived the excitement around AI similar to what Netscape did for Internet and iPhone did for mobile. Those two events marked the pivotal moments and changed the world and lives of billions of people forever. It's still too early for AI to decide if this is indeed such moment...we will know that in next decade or two. But for now there is definitely lots of excitement with every company jumping onto the bandwagon of AI to project that they are not left behind...Companies which would benefit from thi