We’re back in a “bad news is good for the market” mood this morning, it appears… a weak employment report means that investors can again have a little bit of hope that the Fed might cut interest rates sometime this year, and that means investors felt free to bid stocks up a bit.

We have essentially no idea what will happen to interest rates over the next year… but that’s always the case, really, so I’ll just assume that they probably stay close to where they are, and inflation probably stays pretty close to where it is, too, perhaps gradually continuing to come down over time if housing costs finally get to be more manageable, but there’s absolutely a meaningful chance that things could get much better or much worse over the next year when it comes to overall economic growth, inflation, or interest rates.

Especially because it’s an election year, and therefore we’ll probably be riding an emotional knife edge as both parties, and most media outlets, strive to alert us to the fact that the world is likely to come to an end if the November coin flip goes the wrong way (and for half of them, it will go the wrong way, therefore probably leading to panic and despair — we just don’t know which half yet).

So we’ll stick with the stuff we can understand, and the companies who are doing great work to try to become more valuable.  We got some more quarterly updates this week, and some other bits of news that caught my eye, so I’ve got plenty to share on this lovely Friday afternoon…

Good and bad from the cloud…

Amazon (AMZN) was widely expected to do quite well this quarter, since Amazon Web Services probably had decent sales given the strength at Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, its two big up-and-coming competitors… though the market was a bit jittery on Tuesday, and AMZN shared dropped at the last minute before the close, from about $180 down to $175. The earnings report was encouraging enough to bring the stock back to where it had been a few minutes before, right around $180 again, and it has continued to trickle up a little. Amazon has been out of my “buy” range for a while now, riding on enthusiasm, so what did we learn this quarter? Any change to our thinking?

Well, ...