Forward Guidance

It’s no secret that CEOs, especially public company CEOs, have “a horse in the race” regarding their rhetoric on earnings calls about their underlying companies’ financial health and future growth prospects. While a CEO must tell the truth to Wall Street, management teams will often put a positive spin on what lies ahead.

“Once is happenstance, twice is a coincidence, three times is a pattern.” ~ Ian Flemming

Nevertheless, savvy investors understand that though they should sometimes take bias-driven statements with a grain of salt, no one has greater visibility than insiders. Better yet, investors can gain a fair amount of conviction if several CEOs in an industry make similar statements.

Semis Standout

One industry with an obvious positive trend is the semiconductor/artificial intelligence (AI) space.

Broadcom Smashes Earnings

Broadcom (AVGO) is a top semiconductor and software developer for AI applications used in data centers. After the market closed Thursday, AVGO gained over 14% to print fresh all-time highs. In the earnings call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan revealed that “Three hyperscalers are planning to deploy 1 million XPU clusters across a single fabric by 2027, representing a $60-90 billion opportunity in FY27 alone.”

AMD Touts AI Prospects at Barclays Conference

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) is a leading semiconductor manufacturer for AI applications. Presenting a technology conference, management said they are seeing “Significant in Generative AI and believe we are in a super compute investment cycle, which will drive accelerated market expansion.”

Marvell Spikes After CFO Comments

Marvell (MRVL) is another semiconductor that is benefitting from the AI buildout. Last week, shares soared 23% on massive volume turnover after reporting earnings. On the conference call, the Marvell CEO said, “Marvell’s data center end market has grown to account for 73% of our consolidated revenue in the third quarter, driven by AI, and we expect this percentage to increase again in the fourth quarter.”

Nvidia Sees Insane Demand

No better AI bellwether exists than Nvidia (NVDA). Weeks ago, CEO Jensen Huang gushed that the company is experiencing “Insane demand” for its latest chip, dubbed Blackwell.

Astera Labs: A New AI Leader

The bullish theme is not only occurring in legacy semiconductor stocks like the ones mentioned above. Astera Labs (ALAB), a semiconductor solution provider for AI infrastructure, announced quarterly earnings that exploded by more than 200%. In the EPS call, CEO Jitendra Mohan enthusiastically said, “Our business has entered a new growth phase with multiple product families ramping across AI platforms, featuring both third-party GPUs and internally developed AI accelerators, which drove the Q3 sales upside versus our guidance.”