News and analysis

Shares of Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, announced nearly 17% annual revenue growth 16.9% to an equivalent of $11.86 billion. The company's year-to-date sales production was up 33.8% vs the same 10-month period of 2024. This was also 11% above the prior month's achievement. TSM market value added more than 3% within the next trading day on the news, clearly poised to retake its all-time highs beyond $300 per unit, which were already more than $50 above this summer's highs near $250 and well above January's peaking price at $226.40. TSM is the most dedicated chip foundry if we mean it as a pure-play manufacturer, which is producing chips without designing its own. Still having a market share in the mid-60% range, it is a critical partner for most of the companies developing artificial intelligence (AI) chips. That's why TSM's outstanding achievements inspire optimism for all those investors who were seeking for any fresh driver to dispel doubts about the dominant AI-fuelled demand.

TSM is a key supplier to the AI darling NVIDIA (NVDA). The news helped NVIDIA shares to soar by 5.8% to $199.05 at Monday's closing to offset last week's correction. Just coincidentally or not, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said only several days ago that he had asked TSM for extra chip supplies. Other representatives of the chip segment also benefited a lot from this coordinated move up. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) stock added about 4.5%, being only one step away from resurfacing $250, following dips below $225 last Friday. This significantly supported AMD positioning, which was exposed to increased volatility and contradictory expert estimates following the recent quarterly report.

No company is a separate entity in this industry anymore, because all of them are considered in close synergy by the investing minds. New price targets like $275 for AMD are now almost unquestioned, as well as $250 and higher for NVIDIA against the background of such a strong bullish power. For TSM itself, I would estimate the so-called measured move on charts, from a purely technical point of view, as $335 at least.

Eli Lilly & Co added building a $3 billion pill facility in the Netherlands to investors' ever-growing expectations. The Dutch plant will meet weight-loss oral medicine demand for European consumers avoiding trans-border tariff and logistical headwinds. This came days after Lilly announced its more than $1.2 billion expansion in Carolina, Puerto Rico for its American customers and it wants to start two new US manufacturing sites in the coming months. LLY's manufacturing footprint already includes France, Ireland, Italy and Spain, facilities under construction in Ireland and Germany.

Expanding LLY's production capacities for its long-awaited Orforglipron-based pill is the best news of the week which already boosted the company's stock rally to as high at $955 only five weeks after I shared my personal "bet on at least a range from $925 to $950 per share, that is on a more than $100 of further rise in the coming months, of which at least half may occur within several weeks". And now everyone sees that the actual growth is even outpacing those daring projections for the world’s most valuable pharmaceutical company. Now there is a feeling that it runs to jump over the next mental barrier of $1000 per share, whereas previously it stopped at $972.5 about one year ago. This is even more likely given the accelerating momentum we have seen in the last month on charts. The future appendix area above historic record levels may resemble the same one near bottom prices in August.

Lilly clearly wins its competition in the field of its main Danish rival Novo Nordisk as the latter's products don't have obesity pills, only injection medication, which also reportedly may have side effects. Like a diplomat, Lilly's CEO David Ricks  mentioned the Dutch Leiden Bio Science Park was chosen due to its proximity to the European Medicines Agency and the availability of a skilled and multilingual workforce. Eli Lilly's new plant will also be for oral medications in cardiometabolic health, neuroscience, cancer treatment and immunology, based on cutting-edge paperless and AI-driven processes.

As for me, I prefer swimming, playing tennis and walking outdoors a lot to taking anti-obesity pills, but I will gladly buy myself some Eli Lilly stock to finance my healthy way of life with the money from their profits. And what is your life and investment choice?

Stunning results in Amazon's quarterly report as well as the South Korean much-hyped meeting between the U.S. and China leaders are still echoing through Wall Street, being the two major tech drivers till the middle of the current week even though both events took place last Thursday. So what if no written agreements were signed between U.S. president Donald Trump and China’s leader Xi Jinping. It's now clear to every investor that this round of tariff wars is over, with new outbursts being postponed for at least one year or so, as both sides respect each other's word. China will resume supplies of rare earth metals, so important to Trump. The arbitrarily introduced U.S. tariffs, including those related to the fentanyl, have been reduced. Port services and shipments of some of Nvidia's advanced chips outside the U.S. will be unblocked, even if latest Blackwell chips may remain banned for foreign customers. All of the above feeds the most favourable environment for further rallying in equity markets to unfold until Christmas time.

The details of the U.S. Federal Reserve's decision on October 29 are far less interesting, as its chair Jerome Powell's ritually flirtatious rhetoric about a supposedly undestined December rate cut faces the traders community's long and firmly betting on another inevitable slash in borrowing costs before the end of 2025. With U.S. jobs' relative weakness as a factor, all of this are medium-term expectations of the crowd and experts. Stock indexes moderate retreat on November 4 attributed to investors' worries about the health of the U.S. economy is still within the mainframe of this general concept. The pullback in the S&P 500 broad barometer came from the latest ISM manufacturing data, which showed that factory activity in the U.S. is still contracting for an eighth straight month, with a reading of 48.7 being below the 50-point mark to separate declining trends from growth indications. Testing the waters around 6,750 or some dips just below this level in terms of S&P 500 dynamics could even be worthwhile for attracting new purchases from local bottoms across a wider range of issuers.

Interestingly, the monetary easing with its cheaper U.S. Dollars funding haven't really helped many other companies aside from the AI-based surges and some of those firms who shared their most cool quarterly corporate news. Of course, there are also other beneficiaries aside prominent Amazon, which initially added about 13% to its market value last Friday, then pared this gain to nearly 10%, but only to jump another 4% on the first Monday of November. Even Apple Co, whose revenue exceeded the $100 billion milestone for the first time ever in the non-Christmas quarter and also surprisingly beat its Q2 number in the profit column by almost 18%, saw its share price rise solid within 3% to 5% but only in the first hours of Friday's trading session. Apple lost all those gains, sliding by more than $10 from its own fresh historical peaks above $277 per share. The bullish momentum has been lost amid Apple CEO's admission of continuing supply constraints and lag in rolling out all of its promised AI features globally. Anyway, Apple is still projecting 10% to 12% sales growth for the December quarter, potentially the biggest in its history. With the company successfully absorbing Trump tariffs, the market will probably respond sooner or later to clearly bullish fundamental signs, as it is based on a new AI-powered Siri on the horizon.

However, the leadership inside the so-called “Magnificent Seven” group of market cap trillionaires, including Apple, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Tesla, is now breaking. As for Amazon's Q3 results, we previously predicted that growing expectations of a potentially very strong holiday season with its Black Friday, Cyber Monday and then Christmas sales would largely offset softer growth in e-commerce businesses across the entire segment due to the lack of consumer confidence stemming from inflation and trade uncertainty, which, to a lesser extent, would also affect Amazon itself. But the core value of Amazon's report for investing minds is that it demonstrates the unwavering strength of cloud demand, which underpins Amazon's record-breaking performance. While e-commerce may be more or less vulnerable, cloud services and big data power will take care of everything. Every big company that taps into this cloud miracle just turns everything it touches into gold. Anyone who is outside this magic circle may fall behind as nothing is guaranteed for those who are not engaged enough into the cloud industry. A good message for many other AI-related giants, whose fortunes are built partially on cloud piles, including Microsoft and Google, which are next to Amazon in terms of cloud services' sales volume.

Meanwhile, Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is Amazon's cloud division, reported as much as 20% rise in Q3 sales compared with average expert estimates of an 18% increase. Amazon shrugged off a tough prior week when an extended outage at AWS felled many of the most popular websites and consumer apps. This provided its EPS (equity per share) soaring 24% above expectations as AWS typically accounts for only about 15% of Amazon’s total sales, but it makes up roughly 60% of the company’s total operating income. Despite Amazon has been the worst-performing stock among the “Magnificent Seven” in 2025, the explosive reaction to its Q3 report makes questionable which company could achieve the next $300-per-share barrier first, after Google-parent Alphabet nearly touched it in October, and it Amazon could be next rather than Apple, when firing on all cylinders. However, if all three behemoths leave this significant milestone behind their shoulders within the coming months, it seems that none of the adequate portfolio investors will be particularly upset.

The success of Google earnings and the market's immediate response surprised even me, the most involved enthusiast of holding more Google shares in investment portfolio. Shares of Google-parent Alphabet (GOOG), which had already gained 14% since the beginning of the month on hot expectations, soared another 9% in extended trading hours on the night of October 30, nearly touching the $300 mark in pre-market trading. And they don't seem ready to slow down here for long. Perhaps a slight short-lived pullback could emerge, nothing above that.

The major reason behind this was that Google actually reported double-digit growth in every major business, beating preliminary expert estimates by far. Google's diluted EPS (earnings per share) was $2.87 vs much lower average forecast of $2.29, it's fantastic! The search engine-based plus cloud-related business together showed the first-ever quarter surpassing $100 billion in total sales. The so-called top-line number added 16% YoY to hit its record $102.35 billion vs average estimates of just $99.79 billion and against the giant's previous record achievement of $96.47 in Q4 2024. Purely search revenues rose 15% to $56.57 billion. The quarterly cloud-computing contribution surged 34% to $15.16 billion. Ad revenues from YouTube video platform gained 15% to $10.26 billion. Alphabet also said total ad sales are $74.18 billion in the quarter, up 13% YoY, with traffic acquisition costs rising modestly to $14.88 billion. Paid subscriptions, mostly consisting of cloud storage services and YouTube’s ad-free premiums, exceeded 300 million accounts. If these numbers are not enough for you, then the firm's capex (capital expenditures) increased to just under $24 billion during the period for ramping AI data centers and hardware. This will help to monetize AI technologies even better.

Despite headwinds like competitive steps by ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, which just launched its own browser, “our full stack approach to AI is delivering strong momentum... including the global rollout of AI Overviews and AI Mode in Search in record time,” said CEO Sundar Pichai. I have no words to add to these if I would like to justify why Google stock is in my personal top 5 picks to hold for the coming months.