I have learned that earnings season is where perfectly rational adults stare at a company growing revenue by more than 30% and ask why management has not also discovered cold fusion. That is the atmosphere surrounding Arista Networks as it prepares to report second-quarter 2026 results after the market closes on August 4. The company enters this report with enormous momentum, outstanding profitability, powerful exposure to artificial intelligence infrastructure, and a stock price that already assumes Arista will continue executing like a company whose executives have somehow negotiated an exemption from ordinary business problems. Arista is expected to report approximately $2.83 billion in second-quarter revenue and adjusted earnings of roughly $0.89 per share, although estimates vary slightly by source. Those numbers would represent another quarter of substantial growth. Under normal circumstances, that would be enough to make investors happy. These are not normal circumstances. Arist...
There are ordinary earnings reports, and then there are Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company earnings reports—the quarterly moment when much of the technology industry gathers around one company’s numbers and attempts to determine whether the artificial-intelligence boom is still a historic infrastructure cycle or merely the most expensive group project in corporate history. TSMC trades in the United States under the ticker TSM, but I do not think of it as just another semiconductor stock. I see it as the industrial foundation beneath an astonishing amount of modern computing. Other companies design the glamorous chips, announce them beneath theatrical lighting, give them aggressive names, and explain how they will transform civilization. TSMC performs the slightly less cinematic task of actually manufacturing many of them. Without that manufacturing capacity, the grand AI revolution becomes an attractive slide presentation waiting for hardware. That is what makes the next earnin...