The stock markets in the United States are experiencing incredibly active days. Because on the one hand the balance sheets are coming in and on the other hand the flow of economic data never stops. Wednesday was also a super active day. It was a bit of a red day, I will tell you what happened. I will also try to predict what awaits us today. The most important data on Wednesday is the employment data from America, a 233,000 increase in private sector employment was determined. The expectation here was 115,000. In other words, it is a number much higher than expected. The previous month, it was 159,000. So why is this tremendous growth in October coming? Maybe it has something to do with the port strikes. People may have solved their logistics problems by creating more employment before the strikes. But there is an incredible increase that is really hard to explain, and remember, we are talking about the private sector here, not the public. Because we know that the public sector keeps employment very strong. In this case, what the employment report coming on Friday will show us has become even more interesting. Of course, this is not positive data for the FED. Because they are lowering interest rates to combat employment. This is why Wall Street got a little worried. Stocks went down on Wednesday. But I still think the FED will announce a 25 basis point cut next week. Because employment is not the only issue. There is a slowdown in the economy in other parts of America and interest rates are very high compared to inflation.

In the meantime, new inflation data will come today. I will touch on that at the end of the article. Another important data that came on Wednesday was America's economic growth. It was announced as 2.8%, analysts were predicting 3%. FED Atlanta had already said last week that it was predicting 2.8%. Although the growth was a little below expectations, it is almost certain that America will not experience a recession this year. It is very difficult to shrink this quarter with elections, and it will continue like that. This was also positive data. By the way, this is positive for the FED, the FED does not want to shrink anyway. This level of growth does not seem to be a big problem for the FED. It is good that it did not come higher than expected. On the other hand, there was an interesting clue about inflation in the economic growth data that came yesterday. It is called PCE prices, which is another indicator. While the expectation was 2.7%, the result was 1.5%, which is super low inflation. But as I mentioned earlier, the most important inflation data, the inflation data that the FED cares about, is coming today. I will talk about it again later.

Very important balance sheets came yesterday. The first one was Microsoft. Microsoft actually brought a very good balance sheet. The growth of the Azure cloud division in the third quarter was 33%, which is quite strong. Total income increased by 16% and Microsoft has a turnover of 65.6 billion dollars in this quarter. Net income increased by 11% and came to 24.7 billion dollars in net profit. However, they predicted a growth slightly below expectations for the next quarter. They said they would achieve a turnover between 68.1 and 69.1 billion dollars. Analysts were expecting 69.89. They predicted growth on the cloud side as 31%, while analysts were expecting 33%. The company says we need to spend more money on AI. We need to expand our data centers. This is actually good news for Nvidia and they say that what is done on the AI ​​side contributes to the growth in Azure by around 12%, which is a very good number.

So why is the market worried, this small deviation in revenue growth, there is no serious deviation, but what is even more worried is whether there will be a return on the investment made in AI. Because they spent 14.9 billion dollars as CapEx in this quarter. 14 billion dollars of this is the investment made in Open AI. The product that comes out of this is Office Copilot applications on behalf of Microsoft, namely the integration of AI into our Office applications. The turnover here does not seem to be going very well so far. Because the prices are quite high and I think the system is not fully established yet. A subscription fee of $30 per person is required here. Microsoft says that when we look at it on an annual basis, it seems like we will earn around 10 billion dollars from here. Of course, this is a small number among Microsoft's huge numbers, but I think they are on the right track. Still, Wall Street didn't like it. Wall Street is looking a bit short-term. And as you know, up until this point, they were looking for a correction opportunity because the stocks were doing well. Microsoft fell by 4%.

Meta, a very important member of the Magnificent 7, also brought its balance sheet yesterday, a strong balance sheet. The company has created a 19% increase in advertising revenues year-on-year. It was slightly above Wall Street's estimate. The company also made a net profit of $15.69 billion this quarter. This means a 35% growth compared to last year. On the other hand, Wall Street did not like the growth in advertising revenues very much. It said; It grew by 22% in the previous quarter, and there was a 24% growth in the first half of the year, is there a slowdown here? Meta came very fast, as you know, the stock has doubled in the last year or so. I think this is a bit of an excuse for a correction from there. On the other hand, Wall Street said, "You have too much capital expenditures, are you doing the right things with that money?" By the way, to be honest, I was expecting a little faster growth from Meta today. Because there are serious increases in advertising revenues of Google, Reddit and Snapchat.

By the way, Reddit announced an extraordinary balance sheet yesterday and the stock rose by 40%. But Meta didn't go as fast as them. Of course, if we were to make a comparison, Reddit or Snapchat are very small companies. The law of large numbers comes into play in Meta. Another important data is that we know that the Chinese have reduced their advertising a little, especially Temu. Because Amazon has started a tough competition. They also launched their own cheap discount models, which hit Temu a little. That's why they reduced Temu's advertising. It is thought that this may have affected Meta. Another issue that Wall Street analysts with a short-term perspective are worried about is capital expenditures. Meta is making heavy capital expenditures, there was an expenditure of $9.2 billion this quarter. 36% growth compared to last year. A very serious portion of this money goes to projects related to artificial intelligence, where there are important developments, I will talk about it later. Some of it also goes to Reality Labs.

These are places where virtual reality and augmented reality glasses are produced. Of course, the number here is a bit disappointing, they earned $270 million in revenue from Reality Labs alone. However, they spent $4.4 billion there. I find the topic on the artificial intelligence side exciting. Because first of all, it reflects positively on Meta's revenues. Zuckerberg said that thanks to artificial intelligence applications, we recommend more accurate content to users. Thanks to this, there was an 8% increase in time spent on Facebook and a 6% increase on Instagram. These are very important. Because the longer you stay there, the more ads you can show, and he said that advertisers also benefit heavily from artificial intelligence applications. He explained that nearly 15 million ads were designed with artificial intelligence support.

Another topic Zuckerberg focused on was artificial intelligence. As you know, Meta has its own open-source artificial intelligence environment that competes with Chat GPT. This month, they opened it to the UK and Brazil. Thus, it has spread to 43 countries. Many analysts also say that Meta's artificial intelligence is stronger than Chat GPT according to some performance indicators, and finally, I would like to give another incredible number. 3.29 billion people actively use Meta products Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp daily. This means a 1% increase compared to last year. There is no room for further increase. The world population seems to be this much anyway.

There is also a big scandal, a truly huge scandal. I am sure some people heard about SMCI yesterday. The stock lost nearly 40% of its value during the day. Thus, it fell by around 70% from the $1000 level it reached in March. I had said this was a bubble when it was $1000. I insisted on this very much, I think it was a very unnecessary price. Neither the company's profit margin nor its technological know-how supported this price. In fact, a short-seller report came from Hindenburg Research later and they said there were problems with SMCI's accounting records. Later, SMCI postponed announcing the balance sheet and as of yesterday, SMCI auditor Ernst & Young said they withdrew from the audit because they did not trust the data the company provided. In an audit, the company presents you with data, you accept that the data is correct and conduct an audit on it. Ernst & Young says that the data presented to us is not correct anyway. This is of course a very important and serious issue, SMCI could get into a lot of trouble from here. It could even be removed from the indexes.

In fact, Wells Fargo said yesterday that they are no longer doing research on SMCI, we have removed it from our research base. Because we do not trust the data, it is super sad. Mizuho, ​​another important stock research firm, said that we will give you until November 16, find your auditor, prepare your reports, or we will remove you. The possibility of the company being removed from the Nasdaq index has emerged. The company rejected Ernst & Young's statements, said there was no problem. Ernst & Young is making this up, he said. He said they are on the way to finding a new auditor. It will not be easy to find a new auditor. Large companies look at each other and communicate on such issues, and if there is a serious problem in the balance sheet or reporting, no audit firm will go and sign it easily, and if the company cannot be audited, this problem will grow. Therefore, if there are SMCI investors among you or those who say let's buy it since the price has fallen too much, it would be useful to be careful. This process may take a little longer.

There was also some news yesterday that made Tesla enemies happy. Of course, BYD's sales have surpassed Tesla's in terms of turnover. BYD made a turnover of $28.2 billion in the last quarter, while Tesla made $25.2 billion. But there is something that is overlooked here. Tesla only sells electric cars, while BYD sells electric cars and hybrid vehicles. Apart from that, it also sells batteries. Compared to Tesla's 463,000 fully electric cars, BYD sold 443,000 vehicles. Both the number of units is less and the products are much cheaper. In contrast, BYD sold about 668,000 plug-in hybrids. So the comparison may not be quite right. Tesla's last quarter profit was $2.8 billion compared to BYD's $1.1 billion quarterly profit. Although there are accounting standard differences here. These also complicate things a bit. Don't get too excited. Tesla is still the largest and most profitable in the electric car world.

The company that brought the balance sheet yesterday and was a bit disappointing was MicroStrategy. It reported a larger than expected loss in the third quarter. The stock fell 6.6%, I don't think it matters much. Because nobody is investing in MicroStrategy for its core business anyway. They are investing for its Bitcoin inventory. It is an indirect and leveraged way to invest in Bitcoin and yesterday they said they will continue to buy Bitcoin with $42 billion, $21 billion of which will be obtained from equity and $21 billion from fixed income securities. Michael Saylor is absolutely determined on this issue. He says he will not give up this Bitcoin throne to anyone.

Robin Hood is a stock, crypto buying and selling market. It also brought its balance sheet yesterday. It also went bad, they announced a turnover of $637 million. Analysts were expecting $663 million. The third quarter net profit was $150 million. There was a forecast of $169 million here too. It fell short of expectations in both turnover and profit. The company explains one of the main reasons here as promotions. It does promotions to attract customers from other platforms. We spent around $27 million on this. So they say we made a discount, and this damaged our income. They say it will improve in the coming periods. The company's stock fell by nearly 10%. Robin Hood is a very enjoyable platform to use, its interfaces are great. However, it does not stand by the investor on bad days, it suddenly closes the transactions, and you cannot trade. That's why I don't like it, but it is a company with a good infrastructure.

By the way, Robin Hood has a competitor, Schwab. They also said they will open 24/7 trading. Robin Hood was strong in that aspect, it could trade 24/7. Schwab also says it will switch to a similar application. In this case, I think Robin Hood's job will be a little more difficult. Let's come to today, there are very important balance sheets. Apple, Amazon, Mastercard are the ones I will follow specifically. Uber is coming, I am very curious about that too. Mercado Libre is coming. It was among my investments for a while, I am following it with curiosity. Intel is also bringing a balance sheet.

More importantly, today, inflation data is coming, and the inflation data that the FED cares about the most is Core PCE. Here, the expectation is a 0.3 month-on-month increase. On the other hand, it is believed that the annual core will fall to 2.6%. The previous quarter was 2.7%, so 0.32 - 2.6 would not be a bad combination. If the market relaxes and does a little better, it would be great. Apart from this, today, there is data on layoffs. The latest data came in, there were 72,821 layoffs in September. We will see what this means in October. New unemployment applications are coming, 229,000 are expected, we will see that. Also, data on personal consumption expenditures are coming. They will also show the direction the economy is going. However, the data I care about the most is inflation data. If the inflation data comes in well today, the markets are currently looking very red, due to this Microsoft - Meta issue yesterday, I believe we will turn slightly green.

The information, comments and recommendations contained herein are not within the scope of investment consultancy. Investment consultancy services are provided within the framework of the investment consultancy agreement to be signed between brokerage firms, portfolio management companies, banks that do not accept deposits and customers. The comments in this article are only my personal comments and these comments may not be appropriate for your financial situation and risk return. For this reason, investments should not be made based on the information and comments in my articles.