Brian Stewart, our director of news at Seeking Alpha. Welcome back to Wall Street Roundup.

Great to be here. Thank you. A lot of earnings, as promised. Are we starting with tech?

Yeah, I think it's the best place to start. I think tech investors got a lot of comfort

from the recent rounds of earnings, especially Microsoft and META. As it stands, we're recording

this on Thursday. Meta's up 12% on its earnings report brought out to a new 52-week high.

62% higher from its April lows. So it's rallied. Interestingly,

Microsoft has had about the same rally. It's the other company reporting earnings recently. It's up

61% from its April lows. So both companies beating expectations, showing signs of value from their AI investments to just focus on meta for a second.

Revenues were up 22% topping expectations.

It gave strong guidance.

The one note is it raises CAPEX spending forecasts.

It's not going to spend up to $72 billion for the full year.

I think with meta, that's one thing to look out for is whether or not

it's spending outpaces the growth that it sees. It's been kind of a habit with meta over the years.

It gets excited about a new prospect, such as the metaverse spends wildly, well, wildly is probably

not the best framing of it, spends aggressively

to capture the market there.

And then it kind of depends on whether that hits or doesn't hit.

So that'll be the question from meta going forward is kind of the relationship between

spending and the pickup of revenue based on that spending.

And then Microsoft is another great AI bellwether.

It's seeing value from direct AI revenue, including its partnership with OpenAI.

...