For the first time ever, Amazon.com Inc. raked in more than $2 billion in profit, on the back of solid performance of its cloud computing services and its advertising business. Earning $2.5 billion in Q2 2018, the e-commerce giant delivered its third consecutive quarter of ‘$1 billion- and-over' profit – thereby vindicating the firm’s long held invest-more-to-grow-more strategy.Amazon’s Q2 profits marked a massive climb from the year-ago period’s $197 million. A key driver of the company’s solid performance was its cloud computing segment, Amazon Web Services, which generated $6.1 billion in sales – a 49% surge compared to the same quarter a year ago.

In the recent study "Scoring Tech Talent in North America 2018" conducted by CBRE Group, Inc. the team analyzed top-ranked and momentum tech talent markets.An obvious conclusion – try to investigate real estate markets with significant presence or growth of the tech talent. The first place is of no surprise to anybody -SF Bay Area.

Facebook just lost $120 billion in market value, experiencing one of the largest losses for a publicly-traded company. Plunging -19% as markets opened on Thursday, the social networking giant’s stock extended the previous day’s after-hours decline (the company’ shares lost -20% in market cap during New York’s late trading session on Wednesday). On Wednesday, the company’s Chief Financial Officer David Wehner indicated that sales growth may decelerate in the coming quarters.Plus, he also mentioned that the firm is ready to spend billions of dollars every year towards raising the bar on safety and security, following this year’s revelations about Facebook's potential role in allowing fake news’ circulation and in influencing election results.

The per-share acquisition price is at 67% premium to Supervalu’s closing price on Wednesday. Largely a grocery wholesaler, Supervalu supplies its products to more than 1,800 stores and operates in around 200 locations. United Natural Foods currently distributes more than 110,000 products to more than 43,000 customer locations - the acquisition can be expected to bolster its market network even more.  

The European Central Bank (ECB) reaffirms its plans to taper off bond purchases. ECB will keep on buying 30 billion euros of bonds every month until September-end, following which it’ll trim the amount to 15 billion euros per month starting October and finally stop making new purchases by the end of the year. The decision comes amid euro-area’s economic rebound, increase in consumer confidence and strengthening corporate lending. ECB’s stance might be expected to assuage ‘currency war’ fears, as the unwinding of bond purchases could potentially limit the euro’s slide or even bolster its value.

U.S.President Donald Trump feels that Twitter is biased against Republicans. Trump’s tweet read: “Twitter “SHADOW BANNING” prominent Republicans.

Qualcomm's CEO Steve Mollenkopf had mentioned in Wednesday’s earnings call that if China did not approve, the company would walk away from the NXP deal. Qualcomm’s last bid for NXP was $44 billion.It also plans to buyback up to $30 billion worth of shares as promised to shareholders in the event of the deal’s demise. NXP announced that it’ll repurchase $5 billion of shares. While many people seem to be blaming the U.S.-China trade tensions as a major factor behind China’s rejection of the deal, the nation’s Commerce Ministry spokesman Gao Feng mentioned, "This case is about the enforcement of antitrust laws.

European car exporters can heave a sigh of relief - at least for now - as U.S.-EU trade talks result in U.S. President Donald Trump's deciding not to raise tariffs on car imports from the EU. Trump relaxes his tone on tariffs as he and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker promise each other to hold off levies as they both intend to work towards a “zero tariffs, zero non-tariff barriers and zero subsidies on non-auto industrial goods," as mentioned by Trump.The talks included plans of expanding the American export market in the EU for goods such as U.S. liquefied natural gas and soybeans. Earlier this year, Trump had threatened to increase tariff rate on European cars to 25% - from 2.5% - in order to protect America’s national security.

Facebook Inc. took a hit in after-hours trading, as lower-than-expected revenue performance from the firm rattled investors. The company’s shares lost -20% in market cap during New York’s late trading session on Wednesday, even plummeting by as much as $151 billion at one point.Its user growth also was lower than what analysts reportedly expected. The social networking giant’s missing estimates could potentially add to its challenges, if the after-hours trading pang lingers on through Thursday or beyond.  

Twitter has been consistently going up for the past year, and it topped everything off with a 5% gain today at the market close.It will be interesting to see if they make any more drastic changes to their platform going forward.

Second, people now were breaking twice as much glass on their new iPhones than before since now they have to replace the back glass panel as well if cracked. Case in point, I personally bought iPhone X with an expensive $50 case for protecting the phone from drops.The screen of my iPhone is still in great shape, but 1 unfortunate drop last week shattered the back glass panel on my iPhone and now I need to replace it at $150 a pop which I did not have to worry about on iPhone 7 and 6. In other words, the latest Apple fashion statement by covering their last line of iPhones with glass front and back noticeably increased Gorilla glass sales  which caused the stock to jump over 11%, today, July 25, 2018 after reporting strong 68% growth in earnings before the market as well as 10 percent increase in revenues.

At least new home sales missed most analyst’s expectations. Here are the hard numbers: the new home sales decreased 5.3% month-over-month in June to a seasonally adjusted rate of 631,000.But what is important is that the June decline is the largest monthly drop since December – and the prices declined as well. The median sales price decreased by 4.2% year-over-year to $302,000 (Bay Area residents – do not laugh – these new buyers were not buying garages – but real houses).

Bloom Energy is a company making waves on Wall Street, as it emerged as a rare clean-energy “unicorn.” Bloom's technology involves using solid oxide fuel cells that are used in stationary power-generation servers.The servers convert natural gas or biogas into electricity through an electrochemical reaction, which results in lower emissions. On their website, Bloom Energy says that each on-site server, with a footprint of half the size of a shipping container, can provide around 250 kilowatts of power to its customers, or enough to power 160 average U.S. homes.

The demise of the oil rich nation is also affecting neighboring countries of Brazil and Colombia, where citizens often cross to obtain resources they can’t get at home. All of this, being overseen by one of the most corrupt governments in the world, has led to inflation that could top 1 million percent by the end of the year.Venezuela is now on the path of resembling Germany after WWI and Zimbabwe at the beginning of the last decade. Naturally, as strongmen leaders so often tend to do, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has laid blame on the United States and Europe for economic sanctions that have crippled the Venezuelan economy.

Facebook’s hopes of connecting with China might have been blocked, again. For several hours, a Chinese government database showed that Facebook (FB) got the regulatory go-ahead to open a subsidiary in the eastern province of Zhejiang.But the more recent censoring of mention of the subsidiary in Chinese media could be hinting at FB's continued challenge in penetrating the elusive market.  A New York Times article mentions that the approval has been withdrawn, according to a person familiar with the matter who did not want to be named since they were not authorized to speak on the record. Having been banned from having its social networking website in the nation for over a decade, FB has apparently been trying to win access into the Chinese market through various strategies and  gestures for a while – including its founder Mark Zuckerberg’s  holding a Mandarin-language Q&A session with students,  and posting photos of his jog through Tiananmen Sq

Coca Cola beats analysts’ estimates in the latest quarter, slurping rewards on Diet Coke and new launches. The beverage company’s Q2 2018 earnings were 61 cents a share (excluding some items), edging past analysts’ average projection for 60 cents.The firm also spruced up its global presence by launching Coca-Cola Stevia No Sugar in New Zealand and dairy-free smoothie AdeZ in Europe in the latest quarter. Revenues from its core beverage business surged 5% in the quarter, with Coke Zero, Diet Coke, and sparkling water emerging as the major contributors.

Tariffs on imported metals force General Motors to go slow on its profit projections. The U.S. automaker has scaled back its forecast of this year’s earnings to about $6 a share, from a previous projection of  $6.50. The company's stellar earnings potential for 2018 (on the back of its solid equity earnings from its China business and record pretax profit from GM Financial) is apparently getting muted by U.S. tariffs slapped in June on steel and aluminum imports.The company faces $1 billion in raw material costs – almost twice its previous expectation.

In his latest tweet, U.S. President Donald Trump hopes that both the U.S. and EU  drop all tariffs, barriers and subsidies, ahead of his scheduled meet with EU trade chiefs. Last month, Donald Trump threatened to raise tariffs to 20% from 2.5% on cars imported from the EU into the U.S.Apparently aiming to temper trade tensions, European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and EU Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmstrom will meet Trump on Wednesday to propose  a lowering of levies on automobiles and auto-parts among  all major car exporters (akin to a plurilateral agreement). On Tuesday night, Trump’s post on Twitter about the meeting reads, “I have an idea for them.

The giant activewear company is replacing their Chief Executive Officer (Laurent Potdevin) with the established CEO Calvin McDonald.Lululemon has done an impressive job of becoming a high-end activewear company over the last decade. 

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, during the second quarter conference call, revealed a remarkable and completely mind-boggling statistics – Google translates 143 billion words a day.A stranger on the street will answer in his native tongue, and you will hear in perfect English (you can choose between male or female voices with or without a British accent). This service is not perfect yet and it is free for now.