The good thing about earnings season? It gives me some meat to chew on, which means I spend a lot less of my time focusing on the largely pointless exercise of wondering where interest rates will go, or trying to predict the course of the global economy. We got a few earnings reports from some meaningful positions in the Real Money Portfolio this week, so we’ll focus on that today — the most meaningful data comes from Keysight, NVIDIA and Goosehead Insurance this week, so we’ll give them the full treatment, and I’ve also got a promised check-in on some energy storage names.

Keysight Technologies (KEYS) is one of my favorite “growth at a reasonable price” companies, they’ve built a powerful company with pretty steady performance (for several years, they’ve pretty meaningfully outpaced their own growth goals), and they are tied in on a “picks and shovels” level with many of the key growth areas of the economy — telecom expansion, semiconductor production, electrification of everything, etc.

But this quarter, they scared investors a little bit. Here’s the first paragraph of the press release, I highlighted the words that freaked everyone out:

“Keysight delivered strong first quarter financial results, with revenue and earnings per share exceeding the high end of guidance. Our consistent performance is due to the resilience of our business, deep customer collaborations, and differentiated solutions portfolio,” said Satish Dhanasekaran, Keysight’s President and CEO. “With demand moderating, we are staying disciplined and remain confident in the secular, long-term growth trends of our markets.”

The quarter in the rearview mirror was very impressive, they earned $2.02 per share, 17 cents more than analysts had expected. Revenue growth in the quarter was 10.5%, roughly what was expected, but the “demand moderating bit” came out in their guidance — they told investors to expect adjusted earnings of $1.94 (give or take a few cents), and that was exactly the analyst consensus… but they said order flow is down meaningfully, and that revenue will be a little bit below expectations. They’ve also been warning about this for a few quarters now, that the COVID demand surge for some of their product lines, especially related to consumer electronics companies, will have to “normalize,” and it hasn’t happened yet… but judging by this first slowdown in order flow and their commentary, including the talk about some of their large customers working ...