Money makes the mare go

Dear you,

Hope you’re keeping cool in this 30+ degree weather. If you missed it, Mark Zuckerberg broke records when Meta’s stock rose 20% after its Q4 earnings release last Friday. That equates to a gain of $197 billion which Bloomberg says is the most market value any US company has ever gained in a single day of trading.

Last week was a big week for the Magnificent Seven stocks in quarterly earnings. I first started dialling in to these quarterly calls in my first job after graduation because I had to. The final deliverable of my 70 hour work weeks was an opinion that my boss would issue stating that the client’s balance sheet, P&L and cash flow statement were all fairly and accurately prepared.

After a few years of honestly being quite disconnected from finance and instead wandering around in the airy fairy world of consulting, I didn’t realize just how much I liked working on tangible, financial outcomes rather than strategic ones. Interestingly enough, my company’s bonus is tied to 70% financial results and 30% strategic results.

For those who haven’t dialled in to a quarterly earnings call before, the main structure of the roughly 90 minute call goes something like this. The CEO speaks to the executive summary then passes on to the CFO to speak to the three aforementioned financial statements. The rest of the call is Q&A where the investor relations team co-ordinates live questions from analysts looking to update their buy or sell recommendation for the stock.

If you want to hear more about my finance thoughts and thought leadership on my industry, subscribe to my Medium where I’ve unarchived 3 of my favourite blogs from 2022.

⚖️ This past week in numbers

🍎 Step count - 10.9k (finally surpassed 10k quite possibly for the first time ever)

📲 Screen time - 7hrs 38 mins (top 3 were whatsapp, safari and mail excluding maps which were 32mins, 22mins and 21mins on average per day respectively)

😴 Sleep - 6.5hrs. I’m not sure how accurate this is but I use a free app called lifecycle which tracks my location and calculates what I’m doing. Note I was working from home on Monday hence my <40hr work week.

💬 Made you think

I hope you have a great week ahead and welcome to my 3 new subscribers this week. I may have shamelessly linked two of them my refreshed website but I realized I haven’t picked up a subscriber ever since I posted this on my story more than a year ago.

If you’re one of the day ones, thank you for continuing to open these.

Till next time,

Azam