Meta Platforms reports its second-quarter 2026 results after the market closes on July 29, and I will be watching the numbers for something larger than the usual earnings spectacle. Yes, I care about revenue. I care about margins, earnings per share, capital expenditures, engagement, artificial intelligence, Reels, WhatsApp, Reality Labs, and whatever new phrase management has invented to make spending several small nations’ annual budgets on data centers sound soothing. But the number I care about most is advertising revenue. Meta’s advertising business is one of the most useful real-time windows into the global economy. It collects signals from millions of businesses making daily decisions about whether to spend, where to spend, whom to target, and how aggressively to pursue the next customer. Advertising is corporate confidence translated into an auction. When companies feel good about demand, they bid for attention. When they become nervous, they cut experimental campaigns, tighten...
There is a peculiar moment in every Domino’s earnings cycle when professional investors temporarily become experts in pizza crust, delivery economics and the emotional condition of the American consumer. For several weeks, people who could not distinguish dough fermentation from monetary tightening begin speaking confidently about cheese costs, order frequency and carryout mix. Analysts construct elaborate spreadsheets to determine how many discounted pizzas must cross the nation before diluted earnings per share rises by seven cents. Television commentators stare at quarterly comparable sales as though pepperoni has become a leading economic indicator. The amusing part is that they are not entirely wrong. Domino’s Pizza is far more than a restaurant company. It is a franchising network, a supply-chain operator, a digital ordering platform, a delivery system and, in its more philosophical moments, an international mechanism for transforming flour, cheese and human fatigue into recurrin...