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Here's what's ahead on this week's Investing Insights. Many companies exceeded expectations in the second quarter, but falling inflation and a robust economy were happening in the background.

Morningstar Inc.'s chief markets editor is joining the podcast to break down the trends. This is

Investing Insights. Thanks for being here, Tom. Good to be here. So earnings season is

wrapping up. What are the main trends that we've seen out there? Yeah, it's been, I would

actually say, a little bit of an uneventful earnings season in some ways.

Our earnings were solid.

We saw a lot of companies beat their earnings forecasts.

It's a little bit of companies playing the game of guiding Wall Street analysts down,

so it makes it easier for them to beat the numbers.

But also the US economy is holding up better than we had expected.

And so that's provided a pretty solid backdrop for corporate earnings.

And that's been, you know, been good news for investors.

So big tech names like Apple and Amazon, they get a lot of attention during earnings.

What did we see from those companies this time?

Yeah, these companies report early and this time around,

they provided a pretty positive bias for the market in terms of their news.

Google, Meta, Amazon, all had some very nice numbers. And more importantly, they had strong guidance on

the Outlook. Amazon had some very good things to say about its web service unit, the cloud,

and that was very encouraging news for the markets. The exception was Apple, which is a little

softer than some people expected in terms of the outlook around its iPhones.

But all in all, Big Tech had some decent numbers and that provided, you know, provided us with a lift for the market back in July.

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