Earnings season kicks off with a bang; Amazon is expanding its satellite network and car-selling service; Meta Platforms is projected to surpass Google in digital ad revenue; These tiny changes might add 10 years to your life

1) Earnings season has kicked off with a bang...

Goldman Sachs (GS) reported a 19% profit increase for the latest quarter yesterday, as this Wall Street Journal article details. Earnings per share came in at $17.55, handily beating estimates of $16.47.

It wasn't the only banking giant that surpassed expectations, as this other WSJ article details. JPMorgan Chase (JPM) reported earnings of $5.94 per share, topping estimates of $5.51.

Wells Fargo (WFC) also beat earnings estimates, but it came up around 1.5% short on revenues, so the stock opened down 6% this morning (Investing.com article here).

The world's largest asset manager, BlackRock (BLK), beat estimates on both the top and bottom lines, giving shares a boost this morning (WSJ article here).

Beyond the financial sector, the most noteworthy company to report was luxury goods maker LVMH Moët Hennessy (MC.PA). Revenues of 19.1 billion euros were down 6% year over year (up 1% adjusted for currency fluctuations), which missed estimates by 2% (WSJ article here).

I took a look at LVMH's financials on July 15, after someone pitched it at last year's Value Investing Seminar in Italy. The stock is roughly flat since then and is trading today at 20.6 times this year's earnings estimates – which I think is still too richly priced.

This positive start to earnings season is one reason stocks are rallying again today...

After rising 1% yesterday, extending its winning streak to eight days, the S&P 500 Index climbed back into positive territory for the year, up 0.6% (0.9% including dividends).

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is also up for the year. And while the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index is still down, albeit by a mere 0.3%, it has notched the largest nine-day point gain in history.

Analysts expect earnings per share for the S&P 500 to rise 13% for the first quarter, which would be the sixth consecutive quarter of double-digit growth. And investors anticipate earnings season to keep going strong as more companies release their numbers.

The rally has also been driven by the ceasefire with Iran a week ago. Though the latest negotiations fell through, as I touched on in yesterday's e-mail, there's still general optimism for a peace deal rather than a resumption of hostilities.

I hope readers took the advice I've been giving since the conflict erupted a month and a half ago: Ignore the headlines, sit tight, and look to take advantage of market spasms.

2) Amazon (AMZN) announced today that it's acquiring satellite company Globalstar (GSAT) in a $10.8 billion deal. As the WSJ reports, this will allow its Amazon Leo service to compete with Elon Musk's Starlink:

The satellite industry is rushing to find ways to provide connections to airplanes and on cellphones, anticipating a large market will coalesce in the coming years...

Amazon plans to deploy its own direct-to-device satellite system beginning in 2028, pending regulatory approval...

"Amazon Leo has been falling behind Starlink on satellite broadband. Acquiring Globalstar allows them to catch up," said Armand Musey, president of consulting firm Summit Ridge Group.

The WSJ also reported that Amazon is making a big push to sell new cars by expanding its Amazon Autos service:

... Amazon is now tackling one of the biggest retail businesses in the U.S. and one of the last major purchases that is still difficult to make online: new cars. Around $1.3 trillion of cars were sold by dealerships in the U.S. last year, according to the National Automobile Dealers Association.

As the article notes, Amazon aims to work with dealerships rather than replace them:

The aim is to let customers complete much of the purchase and financing paperwork from home, cutting down on the amount of time spent in a physical store. Dealers pay a fee to have their cars listed on Amazon, but shoppers don't incur additional costs if they pull the trigger.

Car buying is another traditional business that Amazon, whose recent expansions include healthcare, groceries and big-box retail, has the potential to disrupt. Yet Amazon says it doesn't plan to cut out dealerships – even if it could upend the traditional car-buying process.

I think these two investments will pay off for Amazon, translating into significant revenue, margin, and profitability growth going forward.

At the same time, Amazon is trading at a forward price-to-earnings (P/E) multiple of just over 31 times – close to its lowest ever, as you can see in this 10-year chart:

Amazon's dominance, growth trajectory, and valuation are why it's my favorite tech stock for 2026.

3) Another one of my favorite tech stocks, Meta Platforms (META), is expected to displace Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google as the world's leading digital-advertising business this year. According to this WSJ report:

Advertising research firm Emarketer projects that Meta will surpass Google in net ad revenue this year, reaching over $243.46 billion, edging past Google's $239.54 billion...

Worldwide ad growth for Meta is expected to rise from 22.1% in 2025 to 24.1% this year, Emarketer estimates. The projection is particularly notable because analysts consider Meta's recent ad growth unprecedented, especially given that they expected Meta's growth would slow given its scale. Google's global growth rate is projected to remain flat at 11.9% this year.

The article highlights several reasons for this outperformance:

Meta's ad business is seeing a lift, thanks to the success of new ad offerings, including the short-form video format Reels, and the broader boost that artificial intelligence has provided.

Meta has demonstrated "incredible patience" in establishing substantial user habits for products like Reels, the microblogging site Threads and the messaging platform WhatsApp before eventually introducing advertisements, according to Max Willens, a principal analyst at the research firm.

This is further evidence that Meta's massive investment in artificial intelligence ("AI") is paying off. As this WSJ article from last week notes, the company just announced a new large language model:

The rollout of the model, called Muse Spark, is a critical moment for Meta, which has spent billions of dollars hiring AI talent in a bid to catch up to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind. The leading labs have been putting out models at an accelerating pace...

According to Meta's internal benchmark tests, Muse Spark outscored Google's Gemini on some tests and was competitive with models from OpenAI and Anthropic on others. It significantly outscored xAI's Grok on most tests. The company said the addition of Muse Spark has made Meta AI more effective at answering health-related questions, one of the top consumer uses of AI.

"Meta just did a step change from Llama 4 to this," said Rayan Krishnan, chief executive of Vals AI, an independent startup that does testing of new frontier models and tested Muse Spark ahead of its public announcement; Llama 4 was Meta's previous model. "They're now a competitive lab. If the rate of progress stays, it's not hard to imagine them producing a state-of-the-art model in a short period of time."

While Meta's ad business is growing faster than Alphabet's, both are clear winners in this space, and I remain bullish on both stocks.

Like Amazon, they're among the most dominant, profitable businesses of all time and have substantial growth opportunities. Yet they trade at reasonable earnings multiples: 22 times for Meta and 28.5 times for Alphabet.

4) It's well established that proper sleep, exercise, and nutrition lead to a longer, healthier life. But I'm shocked at how even small changes can have such a big impact, according to this study covered by the Washington Post:

In a new study involving tens of thousands of men and women, Australian researchers determined that adding about five minutes of sleep, two minutes of exercise and half a serving of vegetables a day to people's normal routines could be expected to add a year or more to lifespans...

First, the researchers looked for what the [statistical mortality] model considered the ideal mix of those habits. It turned out to be at least 7.2 hours of sleep plus 42 minutes of physical activity daily and a high-quality diet (with a nutrition score of at least 58). That combo translated into nearly 10 additional years of good health and extra lifespan...

Encouragingly, the model also suggested that moving the dial seemed surprisingly easy. A mere five minutes daily of extra sleep, 1.9 minutes of added activity and a five-point improvement in diet – accomplished with an extra serving of vegetables or whole grains – raised people out of the model's lowest, least-healthy category, statistically adding a year to their likely lifespans.

Even more important than a long lifespan is a long healthspan. This is the time you have at nearly full health, giving you a high quality of life.

Nobody has written more about the steps you can take to extend your healthspan – and the companies developing treatments and therapies that make it possible – than my friend and Stansberry Research colleague, Dr. David "Doc" Eifrig.

Doc and his team at Prosperity Investor have published several reports on improving sleep quality... the best ways to incorporate movement into your life... as well as tips on nutrition and meditation. They also cover the stocks making breakthroughs in areas like genetic sequencing, AI-powered drug development, and Alzheimer's treatments.

Prosperity Investor subscribers have full access to the team's work on how to improve your healthspan and profit from the latest innovations in health care. If you're not already a subscriber, you can become one by clicking here.

Best regards,

Whitney

P.S. I welcome your feedback – send me an e-mail by clicking here.