Boardrooms love buzzwords.

AI, climate, resilience. But what do they actually mean for CFOs and execs trying to survive the next earnings call? That's where the pre-read comes in. Real experts and real talk. Subscribe to the pre-read, presented by Workieva. Is it chilly where you are, Alexis? Is it cold right now? You know what? It is a little cold. You know what that is?

What is it?

It's this cold open that I'm doing right now.

That's, yeah, that just happened.

We're going to talk just very quickly about earning season, and then we're going to answer

a few listener questions. We've got questions on, remind me the topics.

There's one in there about gold and Bitcoin.

Golden Bitcoin, right.

We have a really timely one on AI spending, of course, one on dividends, and one on private

equity and private credit.

Those are crowd pleasers.

That's a full lineup of crowd pleasers. Let me start by saying just a couple of quick things about earning season.

We're right at the start of the third quarter earning season.

When we say earnings season, what we mean, there's no formal definition for it.

For one thing, companies don't operate on the same fiscal year.

Some companies have fiscal years that line up with a calendar year and some

don't. If you took the companies in the S&P 500 and you looked at a distribution of when throughout

the year they report, you'd see that there were four main clumps of reportings and there were some

stragglers in between. But we like to ask and answer the question every so often, how are earnings going?

So we have to come up with some rough rules. We used to say that earnings season began with a report

from Alcoa, the aluminum company. It was the first company in the Dow Industrials to report each

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