All the Way Optimistic

The fears of economic recession have eased

Summary: Recession fears have now passed, and optimism has rebounded. Labor markets may be slowing, but Jerome Powell isn't budging. Tech companies continue to spend extraordinary amounts on CapEx to meet extraordinary demand growth for AI. Superintelligence is in sight.

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Macro

Recession fears have passed
"The fears of economic recession have eased as worst-case trade policy concerns have not materialized, and proposed tax changes have now become law. Small business confidence levels have also rebounded modestly from recent lows." – Robert Half (RHI 0.00%↑) CEO Keith Waddell

“...we're seeing consumer sentiment take back up, chances of a recession are lower than they were before.” - Mid-America Apartment (MAA 0.00%↑) Chief Strategy & Analysis Officer Timothy Argo

“Our increased earnings outlook…is underpinned by the assumptions that the economy remains resilient with limited risk of a recession later this year.” - CBRE Group (CBRE 0.00%↑) CFO Emma Giamartin

We're all the way optimistic
"I used the word cautious optimism at the end of the first quarter. I would now turn my way all the way to optimism around the macro environment." – International Business Machines (IBM 0.00%↑) CEO Arvind Krishna

“With the potential for lower short-term rates in the U.S. and lower rates already reflected in Europe, coupled with record amounts of private equity dry powder, we're optimistic that transaction activity could accelerate further in the second half of the year” - Ares Management Corp. (ARES 0.00%↑) Co-Chair Michael Arougheti

Consumer spending remains healthy
"Consumer spending remains healthy. Supported by low unemployment and wage growth that continues to outpace inflation. This is true across both affluent as well as mass market consumers. While macro uncertainty remains due to government actions and geopolitical tensions, overall, we remain positive about our growth outlook as the fundamentals that support consumer spending have been strong." – Mastercard (MA 0.00%↑) CEO Michael Miebach

"Within the U.S., while spending growth differed among consumer spend bands, all spend bands in Q3 remained resilient and consistent with past quarters. Within spend categories in the U.S., we saw relative stability to Q2 when adjusted for leap year impacts. Both U.S. discretionary and nondiscretionary spend growth remains strong, and we see no meaningful impact from tariffs." – Visa (V 0.00%↑) President Ryan McInerney

"What we can tell you is what we've seen so far in the first half of the year, in the first half, we just haven't seen diminished demand. And we haven't seen any kind of broad scale ASP increases. And so that could change in the second half. There are a lot of things that we don't know, but that's what we've seen so far." – Amazon (AMZN 0.00%↑) CEO Andrew Jassy

Are labor markets slowing, though?
"You do see a slowing in job creation, but also a slowing in the supply of workers. So you’ve got a labor market that’s in balance, albeit partially because both demand and supply for workers is coming down at the same pace. And that’s why the unemployment rate has remained roughly stable. Which is why I said there – we do see downside risk in the labor market...You know, the main number you have to look at now is the unemployment rate." – Fed Chair Jerome Powell

"Although current hiring and quit rates remain subdued and well below post-COVID highs, job openings continue to be well above historical levels, indicating strong pent-up hiring demand." – Robert Half (RHI 0.00%↑) CEO Keith Waddell

Employment is holding steady for experienced staff
"The U.S. job market remains resilient with the overall unemployment at 4.1%. Labor supply constraints remain. Particularly noteworthy is that the unemployment rate for college-educated professionals is holding steady at just 2.5%, with even lower rates prevailing among specialized accounting, finance and technology roles... our small business clients typically expect experienced staff when they come to us for contractors. And so we don't really have that many right out of college graduates that we place on the contract side." – Robert Half (RHI 0.00%↑) CEO Keith Waddell

Tariffs could still impact the second half of the year
"The year has started great for us and normally we would now be very bullish in our outlook for the full year. We feel the volatility and uncertainty in the world does not make this prudent. We still do not know what the final tariffs in the US will be. We have already had a negative impact in the double-digit euro millions in Q2 and the latest indications of tariffs will directly increase the cost of our products for the US with up to €200 million during the rest of the year. We do also not know what the indirect impact on consumer demand will be should all these tariffs cause major inflation. I have seen that many companies have either removed their Outlook fully or reduced it dramatically." – Adidas (ADS.DE) CEO Bjørn Gulden

"We'll see more pressure in the back half on the margin, and that's going to largely be driven by the tariffs coming into effect...there's a dynamic where the tariffs are coming in before our price increases on a full year basis are able to offset that." – Deckers Outdoor (DECK 0.00%↑) CFO Steven Fasching

The Fed is going to keep taking its time
"I just think we’re going to need to see the data. And it can go in many different directions, the inflation data and the employment data. And we’ll just – we’re going to make a judgment based on all of the data and based on that balance-of-risks analysis that I mentioned." – Fed Chair Jerome Powell

There is dissent, though
"At the most recent Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting, I dissented because I concluded that cutting the policy rate by 25 basis points was the appropriate stance of policy. In a speech I gave July 17, I laid out the case for cutting the policy rate at the July FOMC meeting and my views have not changed since then...I believe that the wait and see approach is overly cautious, and, in my opinion, does not properly balance the risks to the outlook and could lead to policy falling behind the curve." – Fed Governor Christopher Waller

Trump is not happy
"Jerome “Too Late” Powell has done it again!!! He is TOO LATE, and actually, TOO ANGRY, TOO STUPID, & TOO POLITICAL, to have the job of Fed Chair. He is costing our Country TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS, in addition to one of the most incompetent, or corrupt, renovations of a building(s) in the history of construction! Put another way, “Too Late” is a TOTAL LOSER, and our Country is paying the price!" – US President Donald Trump

International

There's optimism in Europe
"While GDP growth across Europe has still been muted, expectations for a recovery in consumer demand and a rebound of investment into the region support an improving outlook." – Nasdaq (NDAQ 0.00%↑) CEO Adena Friedman

There may be pent-up housing demand in Europe
"The European housing market varies by region, though a shortage of units and affordability are common issues. In June, Germany's new government approved legislation to expand home construction by removing barriers at the Lake building projects. Since the pandemic, European households have built up record levels of savings which combined with lower interest rates should encourage housing sales." – Mohawk Industries (MHK 0.00%↑) CEO Jeffrey Lorberbaum

Consumer confidence remains low in China
"Regarding China, what we see is that the general economic environment still creates a low consumer confidence. Currently, the rate of saving is very high. The stimulus that have been created have been very specific for certain sector, and we don't know when they will have an effect on the consumption of luxury goods. What we see that the consumer is, for sure, more discerning. They are more disciplined in the way they spend, but they go for quality and higher price points." – Kering (PPRUF) Deputy CEO Francesca Bellettini

AI deployments are growing faster in the US than anywhere else in the world
"In EMEA, demand from AI deployments is growing, but is still well behind the U.S. Consistent with historical trends, the larger capacity blocks in this region tend to be smaller than those in the U.S. In APAC, hyperscale demand is expanding, particularly in Tokyo and Singapore. Similar to EMEA, AI deployments are growing in APAC, but not like the U.S." – Digital Realty Trust (DLR 0.00%↑) CFO Andrew Power

Financials

IPO markets are opening back up
"Turning to IPOs in the second quarter, we welcomed 38 new operating companies to Nasdaq..Importantly, the strong performance of recent listings, especially of large-cap companies has raised optimism on the IPO outlook for the remainder of this year and into 2026." – Nasdaq (NDAQ 0.00%↑) CEO Adena Friedman

Credit markets are open
"And while April started off slowly with several days of no issuance, conditions improved meaningfully as we moved into May and June and markets stabilized, spreads narrowed back to pre-April levels and issuance picked up significantly, and that helped to offset the early softness." – Moody's (MCO 0.00%↑) CEO Robert Fauber

Dialogue is accelerating in C-Suites
"The IPO market is still not fully open, but the rest of the financing markets, I think we've seen material improvements over the past, let's call it, several months. And so you put all of that together and combine it with the fact that a lot of Boards and C suites want to respond to those underlying drivers that I mentioned at the beginning by doing something and inorganic activity is often a very attractive thing to do...And so we're just seeing -- what I can report is we're seeing an acceleration in dialogue. And the willingness of boards and C-suites to kind of say, well maybe a bit more uncertain than it was at some time in the past, but we've got to look through that and act anyway." – Lazard (LAZ 0.00%↑) CEO of Financial Advisory Peter Orszag

Consumer credit quality remains strong
"Turning to credit performance. The health of our consumer remains strong and we're not seeing any signs of weakness...Our credit trends continue to be strong after seeing delinquencies peak early last year." – SoFi Technologies (SOFI 0.00%↑) CFO Christopher Lapointe

A growing percentage of market participants have never really seen a bear market
"The younger people on the team have only seen the markets that they've been, you know, when you're in college, most people aren't staring at the market. So the 26, 27 year olds just haven't seen anything really bad. So we talk about it a lot. Um, I get other people to talk about it, not just me, so other partners or even outsiders, just to remind people that it won't always be like this. Stocks don't always trade in our range. People don't always buy the dips. And truly bad things can happen in the world and not immediately fix, they can stay bad. So trying to help people just have a bit of a perspective." – Baupost Group CEO Seth Klarman

Consumer

Some US consumers have anxiety
"If I go to the U.S., a little bit more of a difficult situation there. There's a lot of consumer anxiety. They look at a quite uncertain outlook as it relates to their personal finances, job expectations, inflation. So they tend to focus more on essential items." – Mondelez International (MDLZ 0.00%↑) CEO Dirk Van de Put

Consumers are just starting to see price hikes
"We're mindful that consumers are just beginning to feel the impact of higher prices. It will remain nimble to react to changes in the consumer environment, but we're encouraged by the current momentum of our brands." – Deckers Outdoor (DECK 0.00%↑) Chief Commercial Officer Stefano Caroti

The spirits industry is experiencing tough headwinds
"The external headwinds are tough. The market is tough... I mean inflation has been brutal on the consumer products world and particularly on beverage alcohol... The spirits industry... has come down drastically over the last couple of years." – Brown-Forman (BF.B) CEO Lawson Whiting

Ferrari isn't seeing any lack of demand
"We continue to hold a strong order book entering 2027 without considering the new launched cars, and with all the range models currently in production substantially sold out. Indeed, the newly launched Ferrari Amalfi is at the initial stage of the order collection, and the demand for the 296 Speciale family is significantly high, nearly reaching full coverage of the life cycle." – Ferrari N.V. (RACE 0.00%↑) CEO Benedetto Vigna

Interest rates continue to weigh on housing markets
"The Architectural Billing Index in the U.S. is forecasting slowing conditions. Available U.S. housing inventory has risen to its highest level since 2007, though elevated housing costs and high interest rates are constraining sales of both new and existing homes. In this challenging market, builders are offering price reductions and buying down interest rates to encourage purchases." – Mohawk Industries (MHK 0.00%↑) CEO Jeffrey Lorberbaum

“We saw an incredibly anemic housing and construction markets this year. I don't think we've seen anything like this since COVID and since The Great Recession before that. So there's -- I think there's a great deal of uncertainty around people wanting to commit to what is usually the largest purchase in their lifetime during times of market volatility and uncertainty and also with higher interest rates.” - Huntsman Corp (HUN 0.00%↑) CEO Peter Huntsman

"While the broader economy appears to be holding up reasonably well, the combination of weaker consumer confidence in elevated mortgage rates has been a headwind for housing activity. As a result, the spring building season was softer than we were expecting at the outset of the year and I suspect we'll continue to see some choppiness in the housing market in the near term." – Weyerhaeuser (WY 0.00%↑) CEO Devin Stockfish

"Although we are pleased with continued revenue improvement, we've seen very little change in the real estate and mortgage market conditions." – Old Republic International (ORI 0.00%↑) President Carolyn Monroe

Technology

AI supply is racing to catch up with demand
"Demand remains higher than supply... And I talked about, my gosh, in January and said I thought we'd be in better supply demand shape by June. And now I'm saying, I hope I'm in better shape by December. And that's not because we slowed CapEx." – Microsoft (MSFT 0.00%↑) CFO Amy Hood

"On the supply constraints as it relates to AWS and what we see there, as I mentioned, we have more demand than we have capacity at this point... It's really true across the industry today. I don't believe that we will have fully resolved the amount of capacity we need for the amount of demand that we have in a couple of quarters. I think it will take several quarters. But I do expect that it's going to get better each quarter, and I'm optimistic about that." – Amazon (AMZN 0.00%↑) CEO Andrew Jassy

CapEx will remain aggressive
"We will continue to invest against the expansive opportunity ahead across both capital expenditures and operating expenses...We expect Q1 capital expenditures to be over $30 billion, driven by the continued strong demand signals we see...when you think about the full year comments I've made on CapEx as well as the Q1 guidance of over $30 billion, you first have to ground yourself in the fact that we have $368 billion of contracted backlog we need to deliver." – Microsoft (MSFT 0.00%↑) CFO Amy Hood

"Now turning to our cash CapEx, which was $31.4 billion in Q2. We expect Q2 CapEx to be reasonably representative of our quarterly capital investment rate for the back half of this year. AWS continues to be the primary driver as we invest to support demand for our AI services and increasingly in custom silicon, like Trainium, as well as tech infrastructure to support our North America and international segments." – Amazon (AMZN 0.00%↑) CFO Brian Olsavsky

"We currently expect 2025 capital expenditures, including principal payments on finance leases, to be in the range of $66-72 billion, narrowed from our prior outlook of $64-72 billion and up approximately $30 billion year-over-year at the mid-point." – Meta (META 0.00%↑) CFO Susan Li

Even Apple is getting into the game
"On the CapEx side, I think we talked about the fact that we are, and Tim mentioned the fact that we are increasing our investment significantly I you are going to continue to see our CapEx grow. It's not going to be exponential growth, but it is going to grow substantially. And a lot of that's a function of the investments we're making in AI." – Apple (AAPL 0.00%↑) CFO Kevan Parekh

The spend is too great for any individual entity to finance
"On your second question about how we expect to finance the growing CapEx next year. We certainly expect that we will finance some large share of that ourselves, but we're also exploring ways to work with financial partners to codevelop data centers. We don't have any finalized transactions to announce, but we generally believe that there will be models here that will attract significant external financing to support large-scale data center projects that are developed using our ability to build world-class infrastructure while providing us with flexibility should our infrastructure requirements change over time. So we are exploring many different paths." – Meta (META 0.00%↑) CFO Susan Li

"And what's quite clear, the necessary tool to get to the arms race to super intelligence or whatever term of art you want to call it, it does take the picks and shovels. In this case, it takes the modern version, the data centers. and we are the best placed firm to help develop and to help fund those data centers and they are with the best companies to have as your partners and we are committed to being their best partner." – Blue Owl Capital (OWL 0.00%↑) Co-President Marc Lipschultz

Super intelligence is on its way
"Over the last few months we have begun to see glimpses of our AI systems improving themselves. The improvement is slow for now, but undeniable. Developing superintelligence is now in sight...The rest of this decade seems likely to be the decisive period for determining the path this technology will take, and whether superintelligence will be a tool for personal empowerment or a force focused on replacing large swaths of society." – Meta (META 0.00%↑) CEO Mark Zuckerberg

"When we started OpenAI, almost nine years ago now...very few people believed in AGI. We kept learning by doing. We had some breakthroughs. We had some setbacks. We got lucky in some places. We got unlucky in some places. And in the way that technology moves forward, we now are in a place where everyone can see this tremendous impact that AI is going to have in the future. So now we're starting to look ahead to superintelligence. And even more than before, our focus must be on wide and fair access. This is a technology that will reshape the global economy and really the whole way we live our lives. It's critical that superintelligence becomes cheap, broadly available, and not that concentrated with any one person, company, or country. We, not just OpenAI, but the whole industry, we are building something PROFOUND. This is a kind of BRAIN OF THE WORLD. It'll be personal, adaptable, it'll be easy to use, it'll give people incredible superpowers that were sort of science fiction only a couple of years ago." – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

Infrastructure is the bottleneck
"The limit won't be the algorithms and the research, but it'll increasingly become the physical instantiation that it takes to make this work. Chips, cables, servers, energy, everything that you need to power this brain. And the more of it, the better." – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman

The single biggest constraint is energy
"You see some of the constraints and they kind of exist in multiple places, the single biggest constraint is power" – Amazon (AMZN 0.00%↑) CEO Andrew Jassy

Infrastructure is the competitive advantage
"And the reason that so many people are excited to join is because Meta has all of the ingredients that are required to build leading models and deliver them to billions of people. The people who are joining us are going to have access to unparalleled compute as we build out several multi-gigawatt clusters. Our Prometheus cluster is coming online next year, and we think it's going to be the world's first gigawatt-plus cluster. We're also building out Hyperion, which we'll be able to scale up to 5 gigawatts over several years, and we have multiple more Titan clusters in development as well." – Meta (META 0.00%↑) CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Talent density is becoming even more important
"A lot has been written about all the economic and scientific advances that Superintelligence can bring, and I'm extremely optimistic about this. But I think that if history is a guide, then an even more important role will be how Superintelligence empowers people to be more creative, develop culture and communities, connect with each other and lead more fulfilling lives. o build this future, we've established Meta Superintelligence Labs, which includes our foundations, product and fare teams as well as a new lab that is focused on developing the next generation of our models. ... I'm excited to work closely with them. and the world-class group of AI researchers and infrastructure and data engineers that we're assembling. I spent a lot of time building this team this quarter...In terms of the shape of the effort overall, I guess I've just gotten a little bit more convinced around the ability for small talent-dense teams to be the optimal configuration for driving frontier research." – Meta (META 0.00%↑) CEO Mark Zuckerberg

Meta's talent binge is impacting its income statement
"Aside from infrastructure, we expect the second largest driver of growth to be employee compensation as we add technical talent in priority areas and recognize a full year of compensation expenses for employees hired throughout 2025. We expect these factors will result in a 2026 year-over-year expense growth rate that is above the 2025 expense growth rate." – Meta Platforms (META 0.00%↑) CFO Susan Li

AI will be required to solve the infrastructure bottlenecks
"Our workload of our customers is going up exponentially because of Moore's Law and 3D-IC. So this is a very different environment than if the workload is constant in some industry that is not evolving. In chip design, like by 2030, the chips will be -- right now, they're 100 billion to 200 billion transistors. -- is expected the chips will be 1 trillion transistors by 2030. Then you add all the software, you add the new architecture. So the workload will go up by 30, 40x in the next five years, okay? There's not even enough talent or headcount to hire to meet that requirement of 30x. So this is not an industry in which the workload is going to be fixed, okay? And then the worry of the people is if you use AI, your job will be affected. Here, you need AI to cope up with the 30x." – Cadence Design Systems (CDNS 0.00%↑) CEO Anirudh Devgan

AI is already being used in chip design
"Then there is on the other side, which is verification and RTL writing. This whole notion of LLMs generating and reasoning element generating code is a big thing, not just in software development, like CC but also chip design and RTL. So those two areas are very, very positive. One is in the front end with RTL generation and verification and the other is in the back end in PPA optimization" – Cadence Design Systems (CDNS 0.00%↑) CEO Anirudh Devgan

Where does this leave human-generated content?
"Over the last 25 years, publishers allowed Google and other search engines to copy their content in exchange for sending them traffic. But recently, that traffic has been falling dramatically. Based on the data that Cloudflare has observed, it's nearly 10x harder to get traffic from Google than it was just 10 years ago. What's changed? The interface of the web is switching from search to AI. Even at Google, which has represented the dominant interface for discovering the web, most searches now include an AI overview, which Pew Research has found significantly decreases the likelihood of someone clicking on a link and reading original content. Pew's data aligns exactly with what we've observed based on our customers' traffic. It's even worse with pure AI companies. Every AI company we've tracked is worse than the Google of old with some being as much as 30,000x harder to get traffic from. As the interface of the web switches from search to AI, it's clear more people will read derivatives of content rather than the original content itself. That means the new AI-driven web will kill the old Webs business model." – Cloudflare (NET 0.00%↑) CEO Matthew Prince

Will people still want a place to hang out with other humans on the internet?
"In a world increasingly dominated by algorithms and automation, the need for human voices has never been greater. We see this every day as nearly 50 million scrollers come to Reddit for their favorite communities and 60 million seekers land on Reddit in search of better answers to their questions. In fact, 80% of users in a recent survey that they believe some questions can only be answered by humans as opposed to AI-generated summaries." – Reddit (RDDT 0.00%↑) CEO Steven Huffman

Healthcare

Research funding in the US has remained constrained
"While clinical demand has been encouraging, the research environment, particularly in the U.S., remains constrained amid ongoing NIH funding uncertainty. As expected, demand from this segment remained soft in Q2 with some labs delaying projects or holding off on hiring due to concerns about the future grant availability." – Illumina (ILMN 0.00%↑) CEO Jacob Thaysen

Novo Nordisk has had slower growth for GLP-1s than expected
"The lowered sales outlook for 2025 is driven by lower growth expectations for the second half of 2025. This is related to lower growth expectations for Wegovy® in the US obesity market, lower growth expectations for Ozempic® in the US GLP-1 diabetes market, as well as lower-than-expected penetration for Wegovy® in select IO markets. For Wegovy® in the US, the sales outlook reflects the persistent use of compounded GLP-1s, slower-than-expected market expansion and competition." – Novo Nordisk (NVO 0.00%↑) CFO Karsten Knudsen

Industrials and Transport

Tariffs continue to create uncertainty
"The volatility of the tariff announcements and the unpredictability of other decisions by the United States government as well as possible countermeasures by trading partners are causing a high level of uncertainty. Thanks to our global strategy of serving customers through local production in their respective markets, the direct impact of the tariffs remains limited. However, there are indirect effects, particularly associated with demand for our products and their prices. This is mainly due to intensified competitive pressure and rising inflation. It is still not possible to fully assess the resulting effects." – BASF (BASFY)

Tariff costs are hitting COGS
"For the June quarter, we incurred approximately $800 million of tariff-related costs. For the September quarter, assuming the current global tariff rates, policies and applications do not change for the balance of the quarter and no new tariffs are added, we estimate the impact to add about $1.1 billion to our costs." – Apple (AAPL 0.00%↑) CEO Timothy Cook

Auto markets remain weak
"As we move into the third quarter, we will continue to monitor tariff policy and expect to see mixed demand within end markets, including auto and housing, which remain well below long-term demand levels. One area of the business that we continue to see reasons for optimism despite the uncertainty in the economy is our industrial development pipeline." – CSX (CSX 0.00%↑) Chief Commercial Officer Kevin S. Boone

Boeing is getting healthier
"Change takes time, but we’re starting to see a difference in our performance across the business. If we continue to tackle the important work ahead of us and focus on safety, quality and stability, we can navigate the dynamic global environment and make 2025 our turnaround year...With more stability in operations, we delivered 150 commercial jets in the quarter and 280 in the first half of the year. That makes it the most deliveries in the second quarter and first 6 months of the year since 2018. More importantly, almost every customer I talk to has said they're seeing higher quality airplane deliveries." – Boeing (BA 0.00%↑) CEO Kelly Ortberg

Corporate travel is improving
"Think the green shoots, I talked about them are what we're seeing in booking behavior on the group side and what we're seeing very recently on the corporate business transient side, which is saying that the wait and see, it's thawing, the freeze of April, May and to a degree, June we're starting to see a thaw, but it's really early, which is why my comments, and I know this is quite a filibuster I'm going here, and so there'll be no more questions probably." – Hilton Worldwide (HLT 0.00%↑) CEO Christopher Nassetta

Materials & Energy

AI is driving massive demand for electricity
"We're seeing robust demand for electricity, driven primarily by the rapid growth of data centers. Meeting this demand in the U.S. will require over 600 terawatt hours of additional power generated by the end of the decade, which is roughly equivalent to the current ERCOT system." – The AES Corporation (AES 0.00%↑) CEO Andres Weilert

"A large part of our businesses are positively impacted by the AI infrastructure boom that's taking place that's driving the need for power, transmission, all those sorts of things, midstream investments. And the U.S. is where the vast majority of the AI deployment is taking place today, and so that's just driving a number of great opportunities that we're able to take advantage of." – Brookfield Infrastructure Partners (BIP 0.00%↑) CEO Samuel Pollock

"We're continuing to see strong sales in our service areas, driven by continued data center expansion and economic growth. Notably, 9 of our top 10 all-time peak days in Virginia have occurred this year, including 6 in the last 6 weeks, and our all-time peak in South Carolina was set just a few days ago. With regard to data center activity, we will refresh our standard detailed disclosures later this year, which will highlight our growing contract backlog. But in the meantime, I'll just say that data center interest is as robust as we have ever seen it." – Dominion Energy (D 0.00%↑) CFO Steven Ridge

Electricity demand drives copper demand
"Copper demand globally continues to benefit from the secular trends and major new investments in AI technology, power infrastructure, decarbonization and transportation. In the U.S., demand continues to be supported by these secular drivers, and we are seeing improving trends in Europe. China continues to be a major driver of copper demand and India represents an important growth market in the future. As we've talked about in the past, the fundamentals of the copper markets are highly attractive with the outlook for demand growth to outpace available supplies as we go forward." – Freeport-McMoRan (FCX 0.00%↑) CEO Kathleen Quirk

Nuggets of Wisdom

Seth Klarman sees psychological resilience as his competitive advantage
"So I kind of think that if there's one thing that differentiates Baupost from many other firms, it actually is how important psychology is in our process — both in terms of downside protection, as I described: the ability to not be the deer in the headlights, to not be getting margin calls, not be having redemptions, not be scared out of your mind when something’s gone against you. It's probably the most enhancing thing to long-term returns — that if I can buy on days when my smartest competitors are on the sidelines or even selling to me, it’s a great day to be buying." – Baupost Group CEO Seth Klarman

It's important to be able to recognize when you're wrong
"She wrote something called Being Wrong that I actually think everybody in investing should read. It's beautifully written, and it talks to experts on being wrong—on behavioral economic stuff. There's a lot to being wrong: to admitting you're wrong, to recognizing when you're wrong. There's no actual state called 'I am wrong,' because by the time you realize you're wrong, now you're right." – Baupost Group CEO Seth Klarman

Failure is often a catalyst for growth
"44 years ago this week, I was fired from the only full-time job I’d ever had, when Salomon Brothers merged with another company. I had started as an entry-level clerk and worked my way up to partner. It was a great firm and a place where I might have spent my entire career. But after 15 years, I was told: That's it. The morning after my last day, I started the company that became Bloomberg. All of us have failed, and failure is often the great catalyst of growth and success." – Bloomberg Founder Mike Bloomberg