General Motors will reveal its feelings before the bell, which is the financial equivalent of announcing your diary entry on a megaphone while the gym class lines up to judge your core strength. The bell itself insists it is neutral, although last quarter it winked. I’ll be translating their numbers into sentences and their sentences into motives, because sometimes a margin is just a mood swing with footnotes.

Wall Street expects a beat, a meet, and a miss, ideally in one slide so everyone can feel simultaneously vindicated and aggrieved. Analysts have prepared models so advanced they require incense and an HDMI cable. The whisper number is technically a scream, but we’re writing it down as a whisper because that’s how decorum survives.

Trucks will carry the quarter like they always do, hauling margins the way a Clydesdale drags a wedding party after the limo forgets to charge. EVs will either be the future or a very expensive present that nobody asked for but everyone has to admire. Guidance will be a GPS voice announcing it is recalculating, then asking us to rate our trip.

There will be talk of transformation, synergies, and that gorgeous non-GAAP figure that excludes weather, gravity, and the entire concept of depreciation because it is a downer. Labor will be framed as both essential and somehow cheeky for wanting money, while buybacks are discussed in the tone reserved for returning veterans and artisanal charcuterie.

By sunrise, junior analysts will be pretending this was their base case all along while furtively searching for Level 2 EV home charger so their desks look bullish. Senior analysts will nod as if they taught gravity to fall. I will follow the incentive trail, which keeps leading me to a pile of cash shaped like a Silverado.

The autonomous unit will make a cameo, promising a future where your car feels nothing and turns left legally. It will emphasize safety, then admit it is also brave, which is investor relations for ‘please don’t remember last autumn.’ The robotaxi story remains in beta, like adulthood.

Adjustments will adjust themselves, because if you say EBITDA three times in a mirror you summon a consultant who fixes the problem by renaming it. We will meet adjusted free cash flow, a number that is free of many things including the parts that make cash skeptical. Expect something like: our operating income, ex-headwinds, was all tailwind and a light craft services table.

Dealers will be either flush or famished, depending on the angle of the camera and the phase of the moon. SUVs will glitter on lots like bullion you can finance at 7.9% APR, or 0% if you sign away your Thursdays for 72 months. Someone will brag about accessory attachment rates, presumably selling the American dream one all-weather SUV cargo liner at a time.

Macro will thunder into the call wearing a cape labeled Rates. The consumer is resilient, which is business code for ‘still swiping.’ The savings rate is a strobe light and the FICO score is a bass drop, and somehow we’re all at a party in a warehouse labeled Q2.

When the Q&A begins, an analyst will ask a question so questiony it completes a full circle and becomes a comment. Management will thank them for the thoughtful framing and refer us to slide 47, which is tattooed on the inside of a briefcase we are not allowed to open. I will time how long it takes someone to say ‘optionality’ without laughing.

Full-year guidance will be reaffirmed, or gently reimagined like a cookbook that calls salt ‘optional atmosphere crystals.’ They will promise discipline, which in corporate means doing what they already wanted, only with better lighting. Expect phrases such as execute through cycle and focus on the controllables, which, according to physics, do not include the brakes on inflation.

Finally, the bell will ring again, satisfied that it remains the most accurate forecaster on the Street, up there with gut feelings and that one intern’s lucky stapler. If numbers beat, we will celebrate fiscal muscle; if they miss, we will celebrate efficiency initiatives and new dawns. Either way, earplugs and confetti—Wall Street’s true hedges—will both be richly in the money.