Bloomberg：半导体利润率扩张可持续性存疑，关注2027年盈利预期

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And as always, on the Bloomberg Terminal, and the Bloomberg Business app. We begin this hour with stocks holding steady heading into results from Bank of America and Morgan Stanley, Cam Dawson of New Edge Wealth, writing, "Seasonality and earnings season is likely to spark a rebound in breath, but softness in market leaders, mainly semis, is a red flag for the outlook into 27." Cam joins us now for more. Cameron, good morning.

Good morning.

Five days of weakness for semis. What is the signal? Yeah. Well, I think that it makes us have to question the outlook for 2027 earnings and maybe 28 earnings for semis. We always have seared into our brain price leads data. So, the fact that you have semiconductors trading at 19 times Ford earnings, this is the low end of their range. You're still seeing earnings estimates somewhat ratchet up, but what you see is a big expectation for further margin expansion for semis next year.

I think it's important to sink in. Margins on the EBIT line for semiconductors have gone from 16% in 25 to 42% in 2026. They're expected to go to 49% next year. And I think the question given this weakness is how sustainable are those margins as we look into the out years.

What do you believe is a threat to those margins, the Alo capex or the competition?

I think it's competition. I think it's certainly competition because if you look at the weakness, it's concentrated within the memory names. Look at the Cosby, which is effectively a two stock index given the fact it's mostly memory in that market. That's breaking down microns, a lot weaker than Nvidia. You look at ASML this morning. That's holding up well, but that's a monopoly business. That's a very different kind of market structure than what we're seeing within the memory side of things.

But the margin expansion has all come from the memory names. And that's very important for the S&P 500 because the semiconductors are a 19% weight in that index. In this year, semiconductors have been 35% of overall earnings growth. So, so goes semi margins, so go S&P 500 margins,

one of the index. Where does the leadership come from outside of those names? Where can it come from?

Well, I think in the very near term, we can see a bounce in the everything else just because it got oversold. September seasonality wasn't bad for the market on the surface, but we saw stealth corrections under the surface. 38% of the names in the S&P 500 are still down 20% or more from their all-time highs. So, as we move through earning season, potentially that's a catalyst to see a rebound in those names. I would say though, the bank's reaction yesterday to earnings results that were okay.

They were fine. Yes, you had some misses within some of the trading. That's to be expected. But the core businesses were fine and you saw big huge reversals during the day on a group of stocks that already was oversold, down 12% from the mid August highs. That's not necessarily uh encouraging for a rebound in the everything else. They're lapping some really tough comps clearly. There are some questions though about that capital market activity and whether it returns or not.

How do you see things? How much visibility do you have on the so-called pipeline for the investment banking fees all those kind of things that we're looking to potentially bounce into next year?

Well, I think breaking investment banking into the credit side and certainly into the equity side of things. We saw a lot of debt issuance at the beginning of the year. The question is is at higher rates will we see that degree of debt refinancing, debt issuance? That'll be a question for 27. And then on the equity market side, we've seen this bifurcation where yes, the amount of capital raised within IPOs is at a new record, but the number of IPOs is actually down from 2025 because it's all been concentrated really just in SpaceX.

So now we have to ask the question of will we get Anthropic? Will we get Open AI? When do those names come out? And does that create the tough comps where you effectively won't be able to make up for that difference in 2027? Well, if we are going to be on pause for anthropic and open AI, what does that do to the broader market? Can we get to your price target? Well, I I I think that that raises the question about potential hyperscaler capex forecast because we know that these frontier labs, you look at a name like Microsoft, 40% of their backlog is Open AI.

How much of Open AI's ability to continue to spend and grow their cloud demand is dependent on their ability to raise incremental capital. So when we think about the hyperscaler capex forecast, yes, we can look at a name like Google and say, hey, higher interest rates really doesn't impact Google. It's interesting their their net interest expense is still negative. Even though their interest cost has gone up so much, they still have net debt that is negative.

They have more cash than they have debt. So they can continue to spend, but we can't ignore the fact that you need these IPOs in order to be able to create the capital for the Frontier Labs to be able to continue to spend. You headlined your note. How do we get to 8,000 by year end? Simply don't change a thing. Yeah.

But by year end, we could potentially have one more hike. At the same time, we have oil prices still elevated.

Yeah. I what it that implies 8,000 is effectively today's valuation at 19 times on $420 a share, which is the current consensus for 2027 earnings. So that raises is 420 the right number. We've seen that number get ratcheted up by 16% as we've moved here today. Is there much more upside to that number? And then on the 19 times, you have to ask the question of to your point, interest rates, certainly moving higher would be a headwind, but also financial conditions.

If we continue to see things like high yield credit spreads, weaker credit spreads like triple C's broaden out. It's really hard to make the argument that equity valuation should go up from here. So, it really comes down to if we just don't change a thing, we get to 8,000. But that might be actually more complicated than it looks on the surface.

You sound bearish going into next year. Is that fair?

Can you really be bearish when you have overall earnings growth that is going to be probably mid- teens?

Double digits.

Double digits. That's I think that that's hard to to to do. I think that we've had to be optimistic that you continue to see earnings revisions to the upside, but we think that the big bulk of that is likely behind us. So, we wouldn't be surprised if Ford returns in 27 or lower. But we have to counter that with the idea that if you look at institutional positioning, it still is relatively light. Households are very much all in on this market, but hedge fund positioning is light.

So we could see some kind of rally blowoff top certainly as people chase into the market.

We're going into outlook season. A lot of people are waiting to put pen to paper. They're waiting for the midterms. How crucial is that to you, the outlook for policy down in Washington? Is it relevant at all?

I think it's relevant to the bond market and that certainly matters. If you have a takeaway where the outcome from the midterms means more fiscal profacy and and effectively no reigning in on budgets, I wouldn't expect that to be the outcome for the midterms anyway though because no candidate is running on any kind of austerity or balanced budget policy. So I think we have to accept the