Q2 US Earnings Season Watchlist
Global Alpha Q2 Earnings Preview
Click here for PDF Download US Earnings Season Watchlist The Backdrop US earnings season is here and this earnings season wont be great for the “cheque writers” of the AI boom as everyone's laser-focused on the big tech names Capex spending with hundreds of billions of dollars going out the door on AI from Microsoft, Meta, Amazon. There are risks, outlined here in Mark's article for Livewiremarkets.com But there lies the opportunity, but the companies they are actually cashing those cheques, that’s our focus for Q2 US earnings IREN has $2.8 billion in AI cloud contracts locked in with Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Perplexity. They're not pitching, (like NextDC which was SOTD on the call today) they're delivering. Capacity ramping to 480 MW by year-end, ~85% of 2026 revenue already Datacentre as a service, GPU as a service and memory chips are the trades with the clearest tail winds and the likes of SK Hynix (earnings in 2 days) are 62% of the worlds supply in the chips every AI system is screaming for. Operating margins are running at 72%, they're booked solid through 2027-28, and the forward PE sitting around 6x after a 40% pullback from highs. trading on the NASDAQ via ADRs, which makes access a lot cleaner. Those capex numbers from the hyperscalers might derail the S&P500 or Nasdaq 100 this earnings season, but these the revenue booked to these niche players is probably the best place to hide Other ones to watch The bottleneck for AI is still power, so GEV and Eaton are worth a look Healthcare pick is Eli Lily The Oil major still seem very cheap given the mess the Middle East is, CVX a real value play with a dividend Q2 2026 Earnings Watchlist SK Hynix (SKHY) ★★★★★ Reports Jul 29 (Q2 2026) | ADR Price: $151.16 | KRX P/E: 16.9x | 52wk (ADR): $145.57–$194.80 This is the top priority on the entire list, and also the most chaotic listing of the year. SK Hynix's Nasdaq ADR (SKHY) debuted on July 10 at $149, raised close to $27 billion, the second-largest listing ever behind SpaceX, popped 12.8% on day one, and then fell 15.4% three days later after Korea Investment & Securities flagged that Q2 operating profit would land roughly 8% below consensus on HBM4 shipment timing. That is not a demand problem. That is a scheduling problem dressed up as a demand problem, and the market treated it like the second one. SK Hynix controls the HBM market that every AI accelerator on the planet needs, full stop. Down close to 30% from the post-listing high, at $151 the ADR is priced like the memory cycle is ending rather than accelerating. The Korean listing trades on 16.9x earnings with a Q1 EPS beat, ₩55,493 versus ₩38,085 expected, that nobody's talking about anymore because the last two weeks of price action have been so loud. Our approach here is deliberate: target the ADR on a wrestling bid rather than paying up at market into next Wednesday's report. Key risk is exactly what already happened: HBM4 timing slips further, and the print confirms the bears rather than the bulls. But the underlying business hasn't changed. The market share hasn't changed. Only the price has. Micron (MU) ★★★ ☆☆ No print this cycle, next report Sep 22 (FY26 Q4)| Price: $865.46 | P/E: 19.2x |Last print: EPS $25.11 vs $20.98 est Micron doesn't report again until September 22, so there's no binary event here, just a name we want to keep scaling into if the semiconductor complex takes another leg down on leverage rather than fundamentals. At $865 it's already well off wherever the panic low printed, but the last quarter tells you why we're not walking away. EPS came in at $25.11 against a $20.98 estimate. Revenue beat by more than $5 billion. And the stock put in a 15.7% single-day pop that told you the market was still under-pricing memory going into that print. At a 19x P/E, Micron is the cheapest name on this list by a wide margin, and it's the one where the story is least dependent on any single quarter. HBM demand from every hyperscaler capex programme flows through memory suppliers, and Micron and SK Hynix are the two names that actually control the supply. Our plan: buy weakness, not strength. If the leverage-driven selling comes back, which given $1.4 trillion in margin debt it probably will at some point this quarter, this is one of the names we add to, not trim. GE Vernova (GEV) ★★★ ☆☆ Reports Jul 22, pre-market | Price: $1,079.18 | P/E: 57.2x |Consensus: Rev $10.74B, EPS $3.17| Implied move: ±7.2% GE Vernova reports before the bell tomorrow, and it's already done the hard part once this year — Q1 beat by a wide margin and the stock ripped 13.75% the next session. Management raised full-year revenue guidance to $44.5–45.5 billion and free cash flow guidance to $6.5–7.5 billion off the back of it. That's not a company scraping by on hope. Here's the tension. At $1,079 the stock trades on 57x earnings and sits only modestly off its 52-week high of $1,196. The stock is priced for another beat. A stumble gets punished hard. The wind…
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