📊 U.S. National Debt Crosses $36T

Happy Sunday!

Hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving with friends and family and got some well-deserved rest!

I’m incredibly thankful for each of you as we continue building the best investing newsletter possible.

A big thank you to everyone who voted in last week’s poll—nearly 70% of you chose to keep it on Sunday, so I’ll stick with this schedule for the foreseeable future.

I also appreciate all the detailed feedback and thoughts you shared.

Some key data bites from this week that you should know:

• U.S. national debt has crossed $36T for the first time ever.

• Macy’s found an employee intentionally hid up to $154M in expenses.

• Warren Buffett spoke out against family wealth dynasties and donated $1.1B.

• Jamie Dimon said the next generation of employees will only work 3.5 days a week.

• Former NFL star Rob Gronkowski made over $600K on Apple.

• U.S. business activity rose to a 31-month high in November.

• Biden Administration will give a $6.6B loan to Rivian to build a factory in Georgia.

• Databricks is now valued at $55B per its latest funding round.

• S&P 500 in December is higher 83.3% of the time during an election year.

• MicroStrategy purchased another 55,000 Bitcoin for $5.4B.

• Stocks exceeding 50x forward earnings start lagging the market after 10 months.

• Intel will receive up to $7.9B from the government to build new chip plants.

• BlackRock has agreed to purchase HPS Investment Partners for roughly $12B.

In today’s newsletter:

• 👜 Who Really Owns LVMH?

• 🦅 CrowdStrike Q3 Earnings

• 📈 $10,000 Invested In The S&P 500

Let’s jump right in.

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It’s been a challenging year for LVMH.

Shares of the luxury giant are down 21% in 2024, with waning consumer demand.

• In the most recent quarter, organic revenue fell 3%, driven by a 5% decline in its largest segment, Fashion and Leather Goods.

• Wine & Spirits and Watches & Jewelry also saw declines of 7% and 4%, respectively, while Perfumes & Cosmetics and Selective Retailing managed modest gains of 3% and 2%.

Geographically, U.S. revenue was flat, but the biggest hit came from Asia (excluding Japan), where revenue dropped 16%.

That said, former CFO Jean-Jacques Guiony remained optimistic, stating, “When the business is bad, usually it’s good thereafter.”

• Meanwhile, in November, CEO Bernard Arnault has been steadily buying shares.

CrowdStrike was the biggest name to report last week, and here’s how they performed for Q3:

• 🟢 Adj. EPS: $0.93 vs. $0.81 Est.

• 🟢 Revenue: $1.01B vs. $983M Est.

Investors were watching closely to see if the global tech outage that happened this past summer had any major impact, but it didn’t.

• Annual recurring revenue (ARR)—the annualized value of customer subscriptions—beat expectations at $4.02B.

However, shares dipped after hours, as the company’s Q4 earnings guidance of $0.85 at the midpoint came in just below analysts’ $0.86 estimate.

Despite a near 50% drop following the summer outage, CrowdStrike shares are still up 40% for the year, outperforming the S&P 500.

Warren Buffett’s golden advice is simple:

• Most people should just invest in an S&P 500 index fund and call it a day.

If you’d followed his advice and invested $10,000 a decade ago, you’d now have $34,751.

• This total return means you would have more than tripled your money simply by betting on America.

Not a bad deal.

Notable Companies Reporting Earnings This Week:

Here’s what I will be watching this week:

• Monday: Zscaler $ZS

• Tuesday: Salesforce $CRM, Marvell Technology $MRVL, Okta $OKTA

• Wednesday: Chewy $CHWY, Foot Locker $FL, SentinelOne $S

• Thursday: Kroger $KR, Dollar General $DG, Lululemon $LULU, Ulta Beauty $ULTA, DocuSign $DOCU

I use EarningsHub to track earnings, estimates, and receive AI summaries of investor calls.

• If you’d like an all-in-one earnings tool and see all other companies reporting, I definitely recommend you check it out!

📚 Recommended Reading

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Buys

• Marjorie Taylor Greene (R)

  • Company: Nvidia ($NVDA)

    • Amount Purchased: $1K - $15K

Sells

• Bill Hagerty (R)

  • Company: Keysight Technologies ($KEYS)

    • Amount Sold: $50K - $100K

    • Description: Bond Matured 10/30/2024. Asset held in Roundstone Ventures LLC.

Buys

• Truist Financial Corporation ($TFC)

  • Insider: William H. Rogers Jr. (Chairman & CEO)

    • # of Shares Purchased: 34,180

    • $ Amount: $1,659,781

    • SEC Forms: [1]

• Walmart ($WMT)

  • Insider: Robert Moritz Jr. (Director)

    • # of Shares Purchased: 5,446

    • $ Amount: $499,997

    • SEC Forms: [1]

Sells

• AppLovin Corp ($APP)

  • Insider: Vasily Shikin (CTO)

    • # of Shares Sold: 230,000

    • $ Amount: $74,746,660

    • SEC Forms: [1]

• Palo Alto Networks ($PANW)

  • Insider: Nir Zuk (EVP, CTO)

    • # of Shares Sold: 168,000

    • $ Amount: $65,081,831

    • SEC Forms: [1]

• Intuit Inc ($INTU)

  • Insider: Scott Cook (Founder)

    • # of Shares Sold: 75,000

    • $ Amount: $48,136,222

    • SEC Forms: [1]

🤝 Review of the Week