Stocks

This year's Amazon Web Services reInvent brought over 55,000 attendees to one of the premier tech industry events. The obvious and noticeable change in this year's event was an overemphasis on partnerships and alliances. The AWS leadership team made it clear that partners were more than welcomed.  IBM's presence as the Global Partner of the year did not go unnoticed by the attendees and of course the other public cloud vendors who have not yet had the courage to host in-person events at scale.

Microsoft Faces Its Biggest Challenge Despite Its "Social" Standing Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella’s and Vice Chair and President Brad Smith face their toughest challenge. There was always that belief that so long Microsoft acted like a“good citizen” on social issues they would be immune to anti-trust. That myth has been burst. The FTC has filed a lawsuit and a judge must decide if the case is strong enough to block the $69B deal. The FTC fears Microsoft will not provide titles for other platforms. Other headwinds include 16 countries that will have to approve the mega deal. China will probably block the deal to protect TenCent's position. Tencent also owns 5% of Activision.

The NASDAQ Composite closed out the week with its biggest two-day rally since 2008. CPI numbers hinted that inflation was subsiding and hope sprung that the Fed would take a less severe stance. Should the Fed hiking slow down from 75 basis points to 50 basis points, market watchers remain hopeful and some took advantage of the early signals of slowing inflation.

All Eyes On Digital Giant Earnings With recession headwinds driving lower valuations and earnings uncertainty in high gear, the level of fear remains high. However, in the past week, NASDAQ was up 5.2%. So the big question,will these digital giants hold their gains ahead of earnings season?