Brian Stewart, Seeking Alpha's Stalwart director of news, the last episode of January.

It's a dozy. We got a lot to talk about.

Yeah, there's a lot going on.

Welcome back to this show. Thank you very much. Talk to us. Earnings, new Fed chair, brouhaha galore. Yeah, I think jumping on earnings, right? So we had a bunch of big-name earnings. We had Microsoft. We had meta, Apple, Tesla this past week, kind of the meat of the earning season getting going.

I think it's interesting to look at Microsoft and Meta as a pair.

Both companies beat expectations.

Both companies revealed higher CapEx spending for Meta.

They're now spending $17 billion in the past quarter for R&D.

That's 41% growth from last year.

It was 15 billion in Q3, it was 13 billion in Q2.

Back when Meta changed its name from Facebook to Meta, in that specific quarter, they had spent $6 billion on R&D.

So you can just see them constantly cranking up the amount they're spending.

Meanwhile, the stocks, Microsoft and Meadow went in different directions.

So Microsoft was down 10%.

Meadow was up about 10%. And so there's, there's kind of a

interesting dichotomy in how the market was reacting to what seems on the surface is relatively

similar news. I think one thing to look at is just the relative placement that Microsoft stock

and meta stock had going into the earnings report.

So as of the end of 2025, Microsoft was up 17% over a one-year basis, and meta was down

4%.

So you had more of a optimistic view of Microsoft's prospects as we are closing out 2025.

And then going into the earnings report, you saw Meta rise, five out of the six sessions

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