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Apple (AAPL) announced a CFO change on Monday, just ahead of an iPhone 16 launch that could spur a new era of growth for the company. While the C-suite change could feed some investors' worries, many analysts expect a "seamless" transition.
Luca Maestri will step down as CFO at the end of the year with Kevan Parekh, Apple’s vice president of financial planning and analysis, set to take over the role.
Maestri has been Apple's CFO for over a decade. During this time the company's revenue more than doubled and services segment revenue grew more than five times, Apple said in its announcement. He will continue to lead the Corporate Services teams, reporting to CEO Tim Cook.
As CFO, Maestri presided over some big changes to how the tech giant discloses financial information. During Apple's fourth-quarter earnings call in 2018, Maestri announced changes to the way the company reported financials for its services business but more importantly that it was doing away with disclosing how many iPhones and iPads it sold every quarter going forward.
"The number of units sold in any 90-day period is not necessarily representative of the underlying strength of our business," Maestri said on that call, adding, "furthermore a unit of sale is less relevant for us today than it was in the past given the breadth of our portfolio and the wider sales price dispersion within any given product line."
The company continues to report revenue figures from sales of major device categories.
Maestri said he has "enormous confidence" in his successor. Parekh has been with Apple for 11 years after holding senior leadership roles at Thomson Reuters (TRI) and General Motors (GM).
Citi analysts said Maestri's departure from the CFO role is "a bit negative" for Apple given the company's margin expansion during his tenure. Wedbush and Bank of America analysts said they expect a smooth CFO transition with minimal impact on investors or the company.
Melius Research analysts said the change represents an example of "good succession planning" as they expect the new CEO to maintain the pillars of the investment thesis.
Apple shares were up about 0.5% in recent trading Tuesday. The stock has gained roughly 20% this year.
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Popular singer Solidstar has celebrated his partner for being loyal to him for over 10 years despite causing her p+in, t£ars, and heartbreak.
He said for over ten years all she got from me was pains, t£ars and heart breaks. But she never gave up on him.
Investopedia
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Market participants breathed a sigh of relief when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell signaled during a speech on Friday that interest rate cuts are coming. The question now is: Will the central bank be as aggressive in its easing as investors expect?
Markets have been anticipating the Fed’s pivot for most of this year, and have tended to overestimate how quickly the central bank would cut rates. At the start of the year, markets were pricing in the likelihood that the Fed would trim as much as one-and-a-half percentage points from its benchmark fed funds rate by the end of 2024, with cuts starting in March. Several months later, the influential rate remains exactly where it's been for over a year, at its highest level since 2001.
In his eagerly anticipated remarks Friday at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium, Powell said the "time has come for policy to adjust" as inflation has eased and the labor market has cooled, though he stopped short of promising that a rate cut would be made at the Fed's next policy meeting in September. “The direction of the travel is clear, and the timing and pace of rate cuts will depend on incoming data, the evolving outlook, and the balance of risks,” he said.
On Wall Street, however, the speech was taken as effectively a guarantee that rates will be lowered next month.
“Chair Powell’s Jackson Hole speech confirmed that the Fed is now at the point of paring,” wrote Bank of Montreal (BMO) analysts on Friday. “Indeed, we judge we’re also now at the point where the data no longer have to the Fed to cut policy rates.”
Markets are currently pricing in about a 75% chance that the Fed will cut the benchmark rate by at least a full percentage point from its current range of 5.25%-5.50% by the end of the year, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool, which forecasts rate movements based on fed funds futures trading data. If the Fed follows that script, it would need to cut the rate by half a percentage point, or 50 basis points, at one of its three remaining monetary policy meetings in 2024.
Powell’s speech shored up “expectations for an already priced in 25-bps rate cut in September while his cautious tone about the health of the labor market left the prospects of 50 bps on the table,” wrote market analysts Tom Essaye and Tyler Richey in a report Monday.
BMO analysts, meanwhile, don’t expect the data to justify larger cuts. “Signs of an economic slowdown are becoming more visible now, but fears that the Fed needs to make bigger-than-usual 50 basis point cuts to avoid a recession are also not strongly supported by the data,” Chief U.S. Economist Scott Anderson wrote on Friday.
Traders are holding out hope, though. As of early Tuesday afternoon, fed fund futures trading data implied a 36% chance of a 50 basis point cut in September, up from less than a 30% likelihood priced in a week ago.
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Investopedia
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Shares of Hims & Hers Health (HIMS) sank in intraday trading Tuesday on new competition for lower-priced weight-loss drugs from Eli Lilly (LLY).
Lilly announced that it would be selling the two lowest doses of its popular injectable obesity drug Zepbound in single-use vials that patients would measure themselves.
Lilly said those would be priced at half the cost of the pre-filled vials currently prescribed. In addition, the medicine would be sent through the company's LillyDirect self-pay channel, helping those not eligible for Zepbound's savings program or without insurance coverage to afford it.
That was bad news for Hims & Hers Health, which offers direct-to-consumer copycat versions of prescription drugs at reduced prices. In May, it began selling an injectable with the same key ingredient that's in Novo Nordisk's (NVO) popular weight-loss treatments Wegovy and Ozempic. Hims & Hers also said in its recent earnings call that it planned to have one similar to Zepbound "in the near future."
Hims & Hers Health shares sank 7% to $15.08 as of 11:15 a.m. ET Tuesday but remain nearly 70% higher year-to-date.
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President Bola Tinubu will hold bilateral talks with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping at the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation Summit between September 4 and 6, 2024.
Tinubu will visit China to represent the West African bloc ECOWAS at the Summit. The Nigerian president is the chairman of the Authority of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Heads of State and Government.
At the summit, Tinubu will discuss regional peace and security, presidential spokesman Ajuri Ngelale told State House correspondents on Tuesday. Ngelale added that the trip aims to yield significant economic benefits for Nigeria.
The planned meeting between Tinubu and one of the world’s most powerful presidents will take place amid a flurry of seizures of Nigerian assets by a Chinese firm, Zhongshan Fucheng Industrial Investment Co. Limited.
A former Deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Usman Sarki, had said diplomatic steps are a surefire way to end the firm’s seizure of Nigerian assets abroad. Sarki urged Tinubu to meet with his Chinese counterpart as soon as possible to resolve the conflict between the Federal Government of Nigeria and the Chinese company.
A French court recently ruled in favour of the firm and granted the seizure of presidential jets belonging to the Nigerian government. In the dispute involving an arbitration award, the court in Paris ruled in favour of the Chinese firm, allowing it to seize three presidential jets on routine maintenance in France as “security” for claims in a decades-long judicial matter between the foreign company and the Ogun State government.
Investopedia
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After holding interest rates at decades-high levels for more than a year, the Federal Reserve is expected to lower rates at its September meeting—a move that will have implications for the Treasury market.
The interest you can earn on a Treasury, its yield, rises and falls based on economic and market conditions. Typically, investors look to earn more interest on longer-duration bonds because their capital won't be available until the maturity date.
When that dynamic flips and the yield curve inverts, it signals that investors expect longer-term interest rates to decline. The yield curve has been inverted for more than two years, but economists say that will change as the Fed's Open Markets Committee (FOMC) cuts its influential fed funds rate.
Investopedia spoke with John Canavan, lead analyst at Oxford Economics, about what investors can expect from the Treasury market if the Fed begins cutting rates. The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
A lot of that will depend on the size of the interest rate cut and what the Federal Reserve tells us about forthcoming interest rate cuts after that.
We expect a 25-basis-point rate cut in September and likely a total of just 225 basis-point rate cuts this year. If it occurs the way we expect, you'll need to see a little bit of a correction in the curve.
You'll need to see a little bit of a correction in yields, meaning that front-end yields are probably a little too low over the near term. As it becomes clear the Fed will not ease as much as markets have priced in, front-end yields may need to nudge a little bit higher, thereby flattening the curve.
We do expect that inflation will remain calm and the economy will remain strong enough to allow the Federal Reserve to continue cutting rates throughout the course of next year.
While we think there's some room for a little bit of a move higher in yields over the near term to adjust for the near-term Fed outlook,we do think that the broader outlook for Treasurys will be for a larger, long-term bull steepening that is front end.
Yields will, over the course of 2025, continue to decline as the Fed continues to cut rates, and that will outpace any gain in the long end.
So we still think that beyond the upcoming FOMC meeting, and over the longer term, there is still good value, in particular in the front end of the curve—say, the two-year to five-year, or the two-year to seven-year note area—which should continue to outperform as the Fed continues to cut rates over the course of next year.
It's going to be positive for equities. Again, we believe that the economy will continue to grow at a modest but healthy enough pace throughout 2025. We did not forecast recession.
At the same time, rates will be declining, which will allow companies to borrow money at more and more reasonable costs. It will also allow them to potentially refinance some of the higher-yielding outstanding debt that they're holding. So I think over the longer term, this should continue to be a positive for equities.
Equities have obviously bounced back toward their recent record highs. The degree to which we continue to see new record highs over the next year, I'm uncertain. We could be in for a period of a sort of bullish range trade that is holding near the highs, but overall, the factors should be positive, and there's certainly the risk that equities just continue to grow over the course of the next year.
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