Macro: Sandcastle economics
Invest wisely in Q3 2024: Discover SaxoStrats' insights on navigating a stable yet fragile global economy.
Chief Investment Strategist
Nvidia earnings on Wednesday is by far the most important event in global equities. Analysts expect FY25 Q2 (ending 31 July) revenue to hit $28.7bn up 113% YoY and EBITDA of $18.9bn compared to $7.4bn a year ago. Given the underlying momentum in the AI industry and the results we have seen from other companies in the AI ecosystem, we lean in direction of Nvidia beating consensus and lifting guidance for fiscal Q3 surpassing estimates. Demand is still driven by its Hopper chips H100 and H200. Besides revenue guidance the market will anxiously look for an update of its Grace Blackwell 200 chip (GB200) which was scheduled for launch in Q4 2024, but has been postponed to Q1 2025 due to a design flaw. As the chart below shows, the momentum in estimated FY25 Q4 (ending 31 January 2025) revenue is still momentum and has increased from roughly $25bn in the beginning of the year to now $35bn. Our view is that the AI wave will continue until the next GB200 investment has run its course as Google, Meta, and Microsoft will take another bet on compute power to see what it can create in terms of models and new AI applications.
The “Blue sweep” scenario was unthinkable just one month ago, but with the Harris momentum in polls (see chart) it is no longer a fantasy. It is important to say that this scenario still has a low probability (around 10%). What would it means if we get a “Blue sweep”? Well, it would mean that Harris and the Democratic Party could more easily implement corporate tax hikes from 21% to 28% and just shave off a significant portion of after-tax free cash flows. That would obviously be negative for valuations and equity markets. For now the most likely scenario is a Harris victory with a split Congress which has implications for the macroeconomy in 2025 as it would make extensions of fiscal stimulus much more difficult.
Together with AI and European defence stocks the obesity theme has been strong this year as demand is extremely high for the new class of weight-loss drugs Wegovy from Novo Nordisk and Zepbound from Eli Lilly. This week, Eli Lilly announced the results of a three-year long study following patients with the risk of developing diabetes. The study showed that those patients that were on Zepbound compared to the control group had a 94% less likelihood of developing diabetes. This is more evidence that the new GLP-1 weight-loss drugs are preventive as much as curing and thus will likely add support for more government incentives, but also incentivizing insurance companies to increase coverage for these weight-loss drugs.
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