March retail sales dropped yesterday morning and posted the biggest upside surprise in months. Consumers are still spending even with gas prices up and tariffs biting.

Apple named a new CEO on Monday. Tesla reports Q1 earnings today after the close. And the Fed is almost certainly holding rates next week, which changes how you should be reading the job market.

Let's get into it.

Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO on September 1. John Ternus, Apple's 51-year-old hardware engineering chief, will take over. Cook's 15-year tenure took Apple from a $350 billion company to a $4 trillion one, and he'll stay on as executive chairman. Ternus has been at Apple since 2001 and ran the design work on iPhone, iPad, and AirPods.

Tesla reports Q1 earnings today after the close. Deliveries are already known: 358,023 units, about 7,600 short of consensus. Inventory surged by 50,000. The things actually worth watching tonight are auto gross margin excluding credits, any disclosure on Robotaxi operations, and capex around Terafab, the terawatt AI compute facility Tesla excluded from its $20 billion 2026 capex guide.

Stocks slipped Tuesday as Iran ceasefire headlines drove the tape. The S&P closed down 0.63%, the Nasdaq -0.59%, the Dow -0.59%, all on worries the Wednesday ceasefire expiry would lapse. After the close, the White House said the ceasefire is extended indefinitely, which should take some pressure off oil today.

The Fed is almost certainly holding rates at next week's meeting. Polymarket traders put a no-cut decision at 99.4% for the April 28-29 FOMC, and JPMorgan agrees. March CPI at 3.3% year-over-year and 178K jobs added in March give the Fed cover to sit still. If you're waiting for lower mortgage or auto rates, the map hasn't changed.

Microsoft is cutting roughly 9,000 jobs, under 4% of its global workforce. The cuts span every region and level. Year-to-date 2026 tech layoffs have now crossed 150,000 across 500+ companies, with the same story underneath most of them: budget out of legacy and into AI infrastructure.

SaaS pricing has changed. Your billing stack probably hasn't. As usage-based and hybrid models become the default, finance teams are left stitching together spreadsheets, reconciling data manually, and closing books under pressure. The cost? Revenue leakage, audit risk, and forecasts no one trusts.

Our new Buyer's Guide for Modern SaaS Billing breaks down exactly what to demand from a revenue platform built for today's complexity — from automated usage billing to AI-native collections and rev rec. Whether you're evaluating vendors or rethinking your stack, this is your framework for getting it right.

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The Census Bureau released March 2026 retail sales yesterday morning, delayed from April 16. Sales hit $752.1 billion, up 1.7% from February and 4.0% from a year ago, beating the +1.4% consensus by a wide margin.

Retail trade alone rose 1.9% month over month and 4.2% year over year. Nonstore retailers (think Amazon, Shopify merchants, D2C brands) were up 10.1% year over year. Food services and drinking places climbed 2.4%.

For the full first quarter, total retail and food service sales are up 3.7% versus the same three months of 2025. That's real growth, not a weather bounce.

This number matters because the dominant narrative for two months has been "consumers are breaking under tariffs, gas prices, and sticky inflation." The data does not agree. Consumers kept spending through a 15% monthly gas price jump and a 3.3% CPI print, which is what a healthy labor market looks like even when headlines wobble.

It also pressures the Fed in one direction. Resilient consumer spending plus 4.3% unemployment plus 3.3% CPI is the case for holding rates, not cutting them, which is exactly where markets are positioned for next week's meeting.

Why it matters: If you're negotiating comp, planning a job change, or pitching a client this quarter, the underlying economy is stronger than the mood. You can act like things are working, because for most consumer-facing businesses, they are.

Entry-level hiring in the US fell 6% year over year between December 2025 and February 2026, according to LinkedIn's 2026 Grads Guide. Mid-level hiring dropped even harder, down 10%. Fewer people are retiring, fewer junior slots are opening, and the first rung has gotten narrower.

The interesting part is what's happening on the other side of the screen. 21% of Gen Z have already started a side business, and 22% are building apps, websites, or projects specifically to show skills they can't list on a resume without experience to back them up. 44% name their network as the single biggest barrier to landing a first role.

That's a behavioral pivot, not a sentiment survey. Instead of waiting on the pipeline, younger workers are building portable proof of skill and shipping it publicly.

It maps cleanly onto a second data point worth knowing. A Stanford and MIT study of AI-assisted customer service agents found that two months of working with AI tools closed the performance gap with agents who had six months of experience without them. Low-experience workers gained the most; high-experience workers gained almost nothing.

Translation: in the early years of a career, AI is a tenure compressor. Six months of output in two. That's a real lever for someone who doesn't have the resume to walk past the ATS layer yet.

Why it matters: The fastest on-ramp right now isn't a better resume, it's a shipped thing plus fluency with AI tools. Build one small public artifact (a landing page, a newsletter, a working Notion template, a case study) and pair it with AI-native workflows. Two months of that beats a year of applying cold.

75% of resumes are disqualified by applicant tracking software before a hiring manager opens them, and 23% of those rejections are pure parsing errors. Fixable in minutes. Do this once and keep a clean master file.

Open Claude or ChatGPT and paste this:

Then run your current resume plus the job description through it. In ten minutes you'll have a fix list ordered by impact. Redo it for every role. Save the prompt in a Notes app file so you never rewrite it.

The people getting interviews this month aren't the ones sending more applications, they're the ones getting past the bot.

Consensus is $22.71 billion on $0.37 EPS. Deliveries already missed by 7,600 units, but margin, FSD subscription growth, and Terafab capex commentary are the numbers that could move the stock either way.