Making Cents Sense

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...

Microsoft will report its fiscal fourth-quarter 2026 results after the market closes on July 29, and I believe this may be one of the company’s most intellectually demanding earnings reports in years. I am not expecting Microsoft to reveal whether artificial intelligence is real, whether enterprises want it or whether the company possesses the technical resources to compete. Those questions have already been answered. Demand is real. Adoption is expanding. Microsoft has assembled one of the most comprehensive AI distribution systems in the world, spanning Azure, GitHub, Microsoft 365, Dynamics, security and its broader developer ecosystem. The harder question is whether Microsoft can convert extraordinary AI demand into returns that justify an equally extraordinary level of investment. This distinction matters. The market is no longer evaluating a promising experiment financed from the margins of an enormously profitable software business. Microsoft is redesigning its capital structure...

Broadcom has reached the stage of its stock-market journey where I start hearing two completely different voices in my head. The first voice looks at the company’s explosive artificial-intelligence revenue, expanding software business, enormous free cash flow, and growing importance inside modern data centers. It calmly tells me that Broadcom may be one of the best-positioned infrastructure companies of the AI era. The second voice looks at the stock chart, checks the valuation, and asks whether I have once again arrived at the party after everyone else has eaten the good food. Both voices have a point. As of July 24, 2026, Broadcom shares were trading around $392. The stock had already enjoyed a tremendous run as investors rewarded the company for its position in custom AI accelerators, networking products, and infrastructure software. At that price, Broadcom was valued at roughly $1.9 trillion based on its recent share count, and its trailing price-to-earnings ratio was close to 98. ...

Financial data and market price are current as of July 23, 2026. Arista Networks is scheduled to report second-quarter results on August 4, so the numbers and outlook discussed here may change after that report. When most investors picture artificial intelligence infrastructure, they tend to imagine enormous rooms filled with GPUs glowing like expensive space heaters. Nvidia receives most of the attention because its accelerators perform the heavy computational work behind large language models, recommendation systems, autonomous technologies, and increasingly ambitious efforts to persuade software that it should do our paperwork for us. I understand the fascination. GPUs are powerful, scarce, expensive, and attached to one of the strongest technology investment stories of this generation. They are also easy to explain. More artificial intelligence requires more computing power, and more computing power requires more chips. But a data center full of accelerators is not automatically an...