After Apple Fails to 'Glow,' Will Debate, AI Steal the Show?

Following a simply horrible first week of September, stocks notched their first winning day yesterday and that looks to continue. We have little on tap for corporate earnings and economic data today, so expect Apple’s AAPL “Glowtime”, Oracle’s ORCL earnings and tonight’s 2024 presidential debate to carry the news.

With no other debates scheduled and polls putting the vice-president Kamala Harris and former president Donald Trump neck and neck, both candidates will be targeting undecided voters during the 90-minute event. Our focus will remain on policy and its impact.

Apple Glowtime a Bit Bruised

As we expected, we weren’t alone in being underwhelmed with yesterday's Apple “Glowtime” event. Some of the perma bulls are banging the same drum, but they are the outliers. Bernstein called Glowtime “somewhat underwhelming," KeyBanc saw it as “a modest negative” and Citi thought it was “in line with expectations.” In other words, there’s not a lot of buzz emanating from an event that left folks with more new devices and not much in the way of Apple Intelligence.

The question now is whether the relatively fat trade-in values offered for older iPhones will be enough to spur what has been expected to be a large iPhone upgrade cycle. Even though the Apple supply chain is gearing up -- and we should see more of that with Taiwan Semi’s TSM August revenue report -- device sell-through to consumers is just as important as device sell-in to stores. This is one of the reasons why we’re asking members to tell  if they will upgrade their iPhones in the coming weeks and months. (

 in our poll.)

In other Apple news, it appears the company lost its court fight over an Irish tax bill worth the equivalent of more than $14 billion. The European Union’s Court of Justice backed a landmark 2016 decision that Ireland broke state-aid law by giving the iPhone maker an unfair advantage. Because of its $153 billion in cash and marketable securities exiting the June quarter, Apple can pay the tab, but we suspect this story isn’t over just yet. Still, it is another bump in the road for Apple from a headline perspective.

Oracle's Ellison on IA, Data Centers

Lending a shot in the arm to beleaguered AI and data center stocks, including our positions in Nvidia NVDA and Marvell MRVL, last night during Oracle’s ORCL earnings call, Chairman and CTO Larry Ellison said that the company has “162 data centers now. I expect we will have 1,000 or 2,000 or more data centers -- Oracle data centers around the world, and a lot of them will be dedicated to individual banks or telecommunications companies or technology companies or what have you or nation states, sovereign clouds, all of this other stuff.”

While Larry is known to be a bit over the top, we agree with the direction of his statement, which also supports robust data construction forecasts. To that, we would add something we uncovered in Telecompetitor that brings even more support for our thinking on NVDA and MRVL shares:

“AT&T’s Chief Data Officer Andy Markus thinks that the advent of generative AI (GenAI) will have as big an impact as smartphones and the emergence of PCs as a household item… An important part of the equation for telecommunications companies, Markus said, will be having enough capacity for the explosion of data transport that generative AI makes likely.”

Also, last night, Oracle and Amazon AMZN Web Services announced a strategic partnership that allows customers to access Oracle Autonomous Database and Oracle Exadata Database Service directly on AWS infrastructure. It also allows companies to seamlessly integrate Oracle’s database technology with AWS’ expansive cloud services. While this is a step in Oracle’s multi-cloud structure, for Amazon, the partnership extends its push to support enterprise workloads and shores up its competitive position against Microsoft’s MSFT Azure. 

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The Pro Portfolio is long MSFT, AAPL, NVDA, MRVL, AMZN.