Brian Stewart, our director of news here at Seeking Alpha.

Welcome back to our Friday conversations.

Always great to have you.

Great to be here, Rina.

So what are you looking at today?

What are you fielding from the market? How are you tiering up, T-I-E-R, the different levels of importance in the market?

There's kind of a background radiation going on in terms of the CPI report that recently came out and the effect on the Fed.

Also, shenanigans out of

Washington, a lot of Doge-related headlines coming out recently. I think that's going to be

kind of a standard background noise for trading in the foreseeable future. It seems that we're going

to have to kind of rifle through the kind of bickering in Washington.

However, I think the stock market itself has seemed pretty immune to any of that.

There hasn't been pickup and aggressive volatility over the last several weeks.

I think by and large, it's been following momentum of its own. A lot of that

is sort of still the AI trade in effect. And I think there's still a lot of individual stock

picking. I think with the earning season peaking in the last couple of weeks, I think

investors have largely been looking at the individual company's financial results and not

been too worried about the macro scene.

So what are you seen from those results?

What has you most interested, either on the plus side or the minus side?

One interesting theme over the last week is there's quite a few old school consumer

companies that did well following the earnings. One example is Philip Morris, which jumped 14%

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