Taiwan Semi’s Hot, but the Stock’s Not. How Should We Trade It?
Taiwan Semiconductor, which just released earnings, is humming and guidance is excellent. But the stock? That’s another story.
Taiwan Semiconductor, which just released earnings, is humming and guidance is excellent. But the stock? That’s another story.
September Retail Sales surprise to the upside, takeaways from Anthropic’s meeting, and other headlines moving the market this morning.
With a few hours to go until the market open, S&P futures are in the red but not as much as the Nasdaq futures, thanks to renewed concerns over, you guessed it, AI spending.
That comes even though Taiwan Semiconductor ($TSM) bested top and bottom-line expectations for its September quarter and guided current quarter revenue to $52.3 billion-54.3 billion vs. $50.22 billion FactSet consensus. During its earnings call, we’ll look to see what Taiwan Semi says about capacity utilization and incremental capital spending to address it.
We’ll also have more to say on Taiwan Semi’s revenue mix during the September quarter, but odds are it strongly favored AI and data center, and we say this following IDC’s findings that Q3 2026 smartphone shipments fell 22% year over year. IDC now expects any recovery in growth won’t come until 2028, at the earliest.
And here’s the standout comment from IDC as if a 22% shipment drop wasn’t enough: “Memory costs have surged approximately 350% since last year and are still rising, creating substantial pressure on vendor margins and shipments. The worst is yet to come.”
With that all as a setup, we’ve got a busy morning with quarterly results from:
BNY Mellon ($BNY)
Charles Schwab ($SCHW)
Ericsson ($ERIC)
First Horizon ($FHB)
Manpower ($MAN)
PNC ($PNC)
U.S. Bancorp ($USB)
In addition to the weekly jobless claims data, we also have September PPI and Retail Sales out at 8:30 AM ET as well as some regional Fed indices.
It’s going to be a whirlwind of potential tailwinds and headwinds, but here at the Diary we’ll do our best to connect the dots and share insights along the way.
Buckle up my friends, we’re going in!
Position: None
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