Making Cents Sense

I have never found dividend investing particularly glamorous, which is one of the reasons I like it. There are no rockets on the launchpad. Nobody is livestreaming from a rented sports car while explaining how a quarterly distribution changed the trajectory of civilization. Dividend investing usually involves profitable companies sending shareholders modest amounts of cash at predictable intervals. It is the financial equivalent of owning a sturdy refrigerator: useful, dependable and unlikely to attract a crowd at a party. That dependable quality has helped make the Schwab U.S. Dividend Equity ETF, better known by its ticker SCHD, one of the most recognizable dividend funds in the market. Investors often describe it as a simple source of income, but I think that description leaves out the most interesting part of the fund. SCHD is not merely searching for companies with large dividend yields. It is attempting to combine three characteristics that do not always appear together: current ...

By an investor watching the customer, not merely the consensus estimate There is a ritual on Wall Street before a major earnings report. Analysts adjust their spreadsheets by a penny, television guests debate whether “the setup” is attractive, and investors pretend that the fate of a nearly trillion-dollar retailer can be understood by guessing whether quarterly earnings land two cents above or below expectations. I have never believed that was investing. It is scorekeeping dressed up as analysis. When I study Walmart before earnings, I am not primarily asking whether the company will beat an estimate that has already been revised, whispered about, and traded around for weeks. I am asking what Walmart can tell me about the financial condition of the American household. I want to know what people are buying, what they are postponing, how frequently they are shopping, whether they are trading down, and how much convenience they are willing to pay for. I want to know whether Walmart is me...

Amazon reports second-quarter 2026 results after the market closes on Thursday, July 30, and I can already predict the ritual. The revenue number will arrive. The earnings-per-share figure will follow. Television anchors will begin speaking faster. A stock chart will twitch violently in one direction, reverse course six minutes later, and then move again when an executive uses an adjective Wall Street was not expecting. Some investors will celebrate. Others will announce that civilization has ended. Social media will produce 10,000 confident interpretations before most people have opened the earnings release. I will be watching the margins. Revenue tells me how much economic activity passed through Amazon. Margins tell me how much value Amazon kept after paying the staggering cost of making that activity possible. That distinction matters because Amazon is no longer simply an online retailer. It is a collection of businesses with radically different economics forced to share one income...

Apple is scheduled to report its fiscal third-quarter results after the market closes on Thursday, July 30, 2026. Here is what I will be watching—and why a perfectly respectable quarter may no longer be enough for the stock. I have followed Apple long enough to recognise the ritual. A few days before earnings, Wall Street suddenly develops the emotional stability of a toddler who has been handed the wrong colour cup. Analysts revise estimates by pennies. Traders dissect supplier comments like intelligence officers decoding enemy communications. Every rumour about iPhone demand becomes either proof of an approaching supercycle or confirmation that civilisation has lost interest in smartphones. Then Apple reports billions of dollars in quarterly profit, and the market complains about something management said during minute 47 of the conference call. This quarter arrives with especially high expectations. Apple shares recently traded around $337, giving the company a market value approach...