This is the meat of earnings season for my holdings, so I’ve got a lot of fairly minor updates for you today in this one-day-early Friday File (OK, call it a Thursday File… sorry for the schedule change, but I’m traveling to Las Vegas, the Land of Good Choices, for a wedding this weekend, and have to jump the gun a little… if you’ve got questions or comments, I’ll try to chime in on the plane). \

The short and sweet of it? Lots of companies reporting solid results, but with valuations across the market generally quite high, a lot of them remain above my “max buy” price. I don’t have any interest in trading around to try to get perfect valuations, I know I’ll be terrible at that (as most of us will be, almost all the time), so I don’t tend to sell much just because things are a little expensive… but I can at least use a little discipline in buying.

So what are we learning about companies this week? I’m writing to you before two biggies hit the stage in Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN), but there’s still plenty to talk about… and as usual, I’ll probably spend a little more time on the smaller companies, I’m more likely to have something interesting to tell you about Goosehead Insurance (GSHD), with a $3 billion market cap, little press attention, and coverage from only a half dozen analysts, than about Alphabet (GOOG), with its nearly $2 trillion market cap, headlines in the Wall Street Journal whenever the CEO sneezes, and 20+ analysts.

Facebook (FB) was a bit beaten down going into earnings, and the problems at Snap (SNAP) gave people a little time to wrap their heads around the challenges the ad market is facing in the third quarter, with fulfillment and supply chain problems maybe meaning that retailers will pull back on holiday ad spending… so the stock did not react negatively to what had to be somewhat disappointing fourth quarter revenue guidance. Facebook guided investors to expect $34 billion in revenue after about $29 billion in the third quarter, and analysts had been expecting a little bit more. I don’t watch as closely as I used to, not being a FB shareholder anymore, but as one of the major pillars of the online ad market what happens to Facebook obviously matters for ...