Sara eisen, jon fortt at microsofts edu event in midtown, manhattan. First up this morning, apple is going to have earnings after the close tonight. Stock hits another record high, its cash hoard could swell to a quarter of a trillion dollars. Josh lipton joins us from apple hq in cupertino with all the details. Hey, josh. Well, carl, apple stock surged more than 60 from its low last may. So can tim cook keep those bulls in charge . After the close today, the street expects apple to report eps of 2. 02 on revenue of nearly 53 billion. They are expected to ship 52 million iphones in the quarter. Thats because many iphone fans could be delaying upgrades as they wait for that new iphone in the fall. He says the wild card this quarter, gross margins, apple could get stung by higher component prices, but could also benefit as is now withholding royalty payments to contract manufacturers in that ongoing brawl with qualcomm. Beyond the hardware, a lot of attention paid to Apple Services which includes the yapp store ad apple music. They expect to reiterate comments from the last apple call when he said services could double in the next four years. Apples cash pile could also get a lot bigger. Companies added average of 7. 5 billion to its cash position over the last four quarters. That means apple could now be sitting on a Cash Mountain of 254 billion. This is the quarter where apple does update that capital return program, ubs thinks apple could increase the total amount authorized from 250 billion to 310 billion. Guys, back to you. Josh, a lot of the sell side is trying to game whether or not inventory and supply and logistics are going to affect the timing of the eight. Thats hard to know until tim cook says it out loud. How much of that is the conversation out west today . I think it is always part of the conversation that we listen to when tim cook and luke take to the conference call. I think investors, i think in past this quarter and to the iphone 8 some call it, we expect in the fall. As we talk on the show all the time, the big bulls there, the debate there, bulls will argue, listen, there is a big pool of iphones out there that are at least two to three years old, a lot of the people that already want that brighter display, that stronger battery and camera, skeptics will argue that replacement cycle keeps getting longer. We might have more color today about how that debate is playing out. Josh, what do you expect for results from china and india . Two key markets for apples growth. I think that will be certainly a focus, you know, last quarter, sarah, obviously the bulls were heartened by better signs out of china, stabilization out of mainland, china, we expect on the call today you get calls about Mainland China and questions about when they think Greater China could return to growth, guys. All right, josh, busy afternoon for you. Well come back to you later on and talk to dan rosen, with Kate Mitchell about apple. First, btig hosting its 15th annual charity day. Bob pisani is there and joined by two special guests. Thank you very much. Of course, btigs 15th annual event raising 4 million, 5 million for charity every year, Dallas Mavericks owner mark cuban joining us, shark tank star and also the real star of the show, steve stark of the ceo of btig. How do you get mark cuban, derek jeter, arod were talking to in a few minutes, shaquille oneal, mike bloomberg, month after month, year after year . Groveling and being nice to them. It really developed into something really special. Everyone gives their time and energy to give back and show the good side of wall street. 40 million you raised in 15 years to your credit. Mark cuban, what is on your list these days . I want to talk about Artificial Intelligence. Thats in the news. Everyone says people will lose their jobs. I had a discussion with you, you think it will make people more productive and will help the stock market. I think people will lose their jobs unfortunately. There will be some disruption. Hopefully entrepreneurs like myself will find new ways for them to work. In terms of the market, larger companies, youre going to see dramatically improved productivity. Youre going to see hopefully revenues go up, but the number of employees to do those revenues support the revenues go down significantly. I think thats going to increase earnings and so companies that are geared towards Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, ive been buying. My Biggest Holdings are amazon, the leader in the space, netflix, who for video, and i started buying twitter recently because i think they finally got their act together with Artificial Intelligence. Stock market doesnt need a lot of help, risk factors were we worried about have mitigated, the french elections mitigated concerns about europe, earnings coming in better than expected. We were talking the guidance has generally been better than expected overall. Now we have the tax cuts at least in motion at this point, what could derail this train . I think unemployment going up. I think it will go up. We saw that retail workers, 90,000 retail workers that were put out of work in this past quarter. So i think there say really strong chance that unemployment can tick up and that could freak some people out. I think the net effect is it will be higher earnings. Sentiment continues to be bearish, historic lows, sentiment reits, high cash levels, putting money to work. That continues to be a tailwind for equities since february 2016. But youre still saying green on the market. We were talking earlier, you think the market can go higher. Im constructive. Katie thinks 2450, with cash levels and sentiment, as bearish as it is, i think and seasonality effects as well, i think were shortterm to intermediate term were okay and pullback over the summer. Thats katie stockton, your Technical Analyst here. My predictions havent been great, but im here to tell you, fortune 50, fortune 100 companies will be able to support their current levels of revenue with 30 fewer employees. You have the most interesting tweets, always fun to follow you on twitter. You had a good one on president trump. Every interaction president has had with a foreign leader has been positive. Yeah. You think so . Hes a good meet and greet guy. Hes personable, can sit down and have a conversation with anybody. Hes a great salesperson. And, you know, sales people are great at doing lunch. I give the president credit. When hes met with president xi, across the board, any country, seems to be a positive interaction. How do you rate the first 100 days . C minus. I say economically i like what hes doing, i like the plans put out there. But if you dont learn from history, youre doomed to repeat it and there is Little Things like, you know, the honorable heading to north korea, and then at the same time saying youre going to charge south korea for thaad defense. Those are nuance things you need to do your homework about because your words matter. How about the tax cuts proposed so far . Look, it turns out the actual numbers the details. 15 is not going to happen. Reducing the tax rate, simplification, ill tell you what, what has not been talked about what i love, what hes doing with the ftc. The biggest inhibitor to Small Business is ridiculous licensing fees. The state of louisiana, you have to have 40, 60 hours of training in order to be a shampooer, right, just to work in the salon. The ftc is working to solve that. Im antinet neutrality. Having more open markets, we dont need more regulation there, so i think what theyre doing with the ftc is great as well. Those are the changes that dont get the headlines but will have the greatest impact. Can he pull through . The market has been holding up on the trump trade, lower regulations, tax cuts, infrastructure spending. Is he going to be able to get anything close to that through, enough that will satisfy the market . There is some kind of premium in the market right now. This may play right into seasonality over the summer where you get that pullback, when maybe some of these things dont come to fruition, as he lays out in more depth what hes thinking, the markets dont like it. Government has shut down. And i think he should be taking a lot of credit for that. Maybe it wasnt the exact numbers that he wanted in terms of the budget, but he got it done. There were a lot of people who didnt think that would happen. He should be you need to go across aisle to get budget extension passed and he hasnt talked about that. I dont think he takes credit for the things that are most important and does take credit for things that possibly get him in trouble. You give him a c minus. You retweeted a tweet, somebody said, mark cuban for president , 2020. You retweeted it. That takes a lot of nerve. Hes getting votes in the ratings room. Is this a serious idea . Well see what happens . It is not my dream to be a politician at all, trust me. Like all of us, we look at what is going on and saying i could do that a little bit better. Has to make the playoffs a couple of years first. Shark tank a hit. A hit for us. A hit everywhere. People love it. It somehow brought people into the whole entrepreneurial spirit, aspiring thats why i do the show. How much more life does it have . We start shooting season nine in june. Little bit more than a month, well be back again, the gang will be back together. Look, the reason i do the show, it sends the message to kids of all ages, the American Dream is alive and well, and thats what all this is all about, right . Twitter by the way just popped on your comments here that youre buying twitter. What is it that interested you after it was beaten up . Twitter the key to Artificial Intelligence is data. Twitter hadnt been able to harness the data to be smarter in how they deliver tweets and use information and how they deliver ads. Now they started to hire the right people, starting to get smart, you see that in the results you get other than chronological. You see things that are relevant that make a difference. And big announcement on twitter and bloomberg yesterday. Well see if we get mayor bloomberg on. The big four stocks, of course, your apples and amazons, they have been leading the charge, the biggest gainers of the nasdaq 100, responsible for much of that. When do they pull back . I dont think people realize the impact of Artificial Intelligence on the performance of the stocks. They are going to accelerate. Companies that know how to harness new data and take advantage of apple, netflix, facebook, google, amazon, twitter, theyre going to theyre crushing the world. Here is the example somebody gave me i thought was brilliant. They said it was scott mcneely, ceo of sun, he goes, how much money do you spend at amazon . Have you ever met an amazon employee . I see three charges a day from my wife on my amex . It is crazy how much we spend. Thats the fundamental change. When amazon opens up a grocery store, not because they want to sell you groceries, because they want to know what you buy and when and what you need and how to use that data to Better Service you. The game will change, the industry, the world is changing, well see a lot of disruption in the nature of work. The divide is on one half people say there is always disruption from technology, the buggy whips are gone, the telephone operators are gone. And other half says, thats true, but this time it is different. The disruption from ai is across all categories. Thats exactly right. I started feeling preseason 1982 when i was 6 months old. No. Then i started selling local networks and then started streaming on. Internet, then High Definition and the first all hd tv network. So when you this is going to be more disruptive than the past 30 years combined and will come faster because were starting to see such an increment and such a dramatic increase of processes and speed. It is different because it is faster. And it is more impactful across the board and it is harder to harness, right . Bigger, smarter companies, able to spend the money, and Smaller Companies arent. Thats going to create an issue and it is advantage goes to the f. A. N. G. S. Rest of the market, were at 2400, essentially, at historic highs, five points off historic highs. End of the year, at 2500 . Do we get anywhere close to new record highs . Who knows what the peaks and valleys are going to bring. I think the market could accelerate because of earnings. I think when productivity is going to skyrocket, even though unemployment i think will go up, a dichotomy there, but thats my feeling. It will go higher 2450 on the s p, midsummer pullback and higher as well by the end of the year. Tech has been affirming their earnings for the full year, Big Industrial names raised their full year guide ans or affirmed the ge to me, the most important across the s p 500, look at the number of employees each company has. Watch them fall like that. So your productivity will skyrocket. Mark cuban, thank you very much. Steve stark, thank you for everyone engineering this 15 years. The man. The man. Derek jeter will be here. Alex rodriguez will be here very shortly and a whole host of other people here. Btig Charity Event, back to you. Good stuff, bob. Were watching twitter pop, on cubans comments. Lets bring in dan and Kate Mitchell. Good morning to you both. Cubans point about earnings, dan, has been held up at least so far in the earnings season, what do we think apple will say tonight . Well, i dont really worry about the quarter for apple. The reality is they have pretty much close to monopoly in the most important thing that everybody carries, their phone. Whether they buy them this quarter or next quarter doesnt matter. The Big Companies i think mark is right, the Big Companies get increased leverage, apple, microsoft, facebook, google, you know, amazon, doesnt matter. The bigger they get, the more leverage they have and the better their opportunities are. I think apple will continue to be on a roll for years to come. Interestingly, kate, mark mentioned apple with a number of other Companies Including twitter he likes as ai plays, not necessarily something we think about, or hear about often when we talk about these companies. It is not driving their revenue directly right now. Are you guys in the valley seeing it that way . I think we look at every company that, you know, ages ago, on the internet, secondly, had mobile, some sort of mobile aspect to their business at this stage, you arent playing the game at all. If you dont have some form of Artificial Intelligence. The way apple can use Artificial Intelligence is like netflix. If im looking for an app or music for any of us have searched in some of those and want to find something new and different it can be difficult and Artificial Intelligence will help me get to that much more quickly. I will be a naysayer on their quarter, not that i think it is going to be down so much, but i think it is interesting you look at ibcs numbers, which they released for q1 sales, they show that samsung overtook apple without a new release of a phone, a real brand recovery for samsung. And now apple moving back into second position. So i think the hardware business for apple this quarter might be a little bit sideways. And with the chinese coming manufacturers coming up from the bottom, again, i dont think a disaster, i agree with dan, you never count out apple as a winner, but still in that neck and neck race with samsung having shot themselves in the foot with their new phone, for them to be back in first place, it is going to be an interesting quarter to see. An interesting battle between the two. Fascinating. I think it was walt who said samsungs quality problems probab probab probab probably bought apple a year. Investors wrestle with this issue where these companies are so large, their distribution chains are so wide ranging that they cant possibly make enough phones and so we all worry about supply chain and logistics going into the print. Yeah, look, there is thats the challenge with quarterly earnings, the demand will be there for apple products for all these large companies, products, whether they deliver them all in a quarter or not doesnt really matter. Over time, if you look at what apple has done in the last year, last two years, how many times have we had a conversation about supply chain or whether theyre in first place or second place and now in an all time high again, just keeps hitting record after record after record. You talk about Artificial Intelligence, what youre talking about earlier, the simplest way to understand it in terms of a company like apple, like amazon, like che, our earnings were improved by the more data you have, the better you can match it and grow your business. Those things happen at scale in the bigger companies. I dont worry about any of these Big Companies right now. I said it for the last couple of years, they essentially have no competition for what they do overall. They might in a particular segment, but these are phenomenal companies who are just doubling down on investing and technology, and the results continue to reveal just how efficient they have become. Nice how you included che. If my stock was up 20 , i would sneak it in there too. Revenue guidance. Were up 140 for the year. For year over year. But thats the reality of being an all digital company, the reality of having a significant place in a large market and being able to use data to your advantage. We see it as amazon, at facebook, at mark thinks twitter is tarting to do it. I dont think it will reveal itself in a lot of the companies until 2018, it takes significant reinvestment to do it. But it will have a dramatic effect. Kate, wanted to ask you to button up the conversation on apple. How much do you think this big surge we have seen in the stock and investors embracing it is about high expectations, the eight coming this fall or selfdriving cars, that secretive project, augmented reality, all the big bets we read about coming from apple, either this year or in the future. Well, just as dan s