Nasdaq Composite Live: Earnings Beats are Pushing the Index to New Record Highs

The Nasdaq doesn’t know the meaning of down.

At the moment, the tech-heavy index is up about 300 points in premarket, last trading at 23,773. From here, we wouldn’t be shocked to see it challenge 25,000 over the next few days.

Fueling Momentum, Microsoft Crushed Earnings

Forcing the index even higher, Microsoft – up $42 in premarket – crushed earnings. EPS of $3.65 on sales of $76.44 billion were above expectations of $3.37 per share on sales of $73.81 billion.

Azure’s revenue growth soared 39% during the quarter, which also came in above expectations for 34.4%. Moving forward, Azure is expected to grow 37%, which is also ahead of expectations for growth of 33.7%.

“Azure growth solves all problems,” said analysts at KeyBanc, as quoted by CNBC. “The last two quarters have rendered the debates all but irrelevant for the time being. The Azure segment produced roughly $500M and $700M of upside to guidance in the last two quarters, respectively, the equivalent of finding a Monday.com in your couch cushions.” 

Bank of America reiterated its buy rating with a price target of $640 from $585. Goldman Sachs reiterated a buy rating with a price target of $630. Morgan Stanley has an overweight rating with a price target. Wells Fargo has an overweight rating with a price target of $650.

Meta Platforms Also Crushed Earnings 

Meta just posted EPS of $7.14 per share on $47.5 billion in sales. Earnings were up 38% year over year, and well above expectations for $5.88.

Advertising revenue came in at $46.5 billion compared to an expected $44.07 billion. The company’s Reality Labs segment saw a loss of $4.5 billion versus expectations of $4.8 billion.

Moving forward, the company expects to see revenue of between $47.5 billion and $50.5 billion, which is ahead of expectations of $46.2 billion.

We should also mention that Meta is still aggressively investing in artificial intelligence and AI data centers. In fact, according to CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Meta is investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build out multi-gigawatt data centers around the U.S.

“Given audience scale, we continue to see Meta as one of the best AI opportunity stocks, with potential revenue upside as AI capabilities are integrated into the ad stack,” BofA Global Research analyst Justin Post said, as quoted by Yahoo Finance.

After the closing bell, we’ll see earnings from Apple and Amazon.