Wednesday, May 22nd, 2024
Markets closed in negative territory across the board today. After a rather uneventful morning that saw major indices tread water at the breakeven point with yesterday’s close, the FOMC minutes from the April 30-May 1 meeting were released at 1:30pm ET this afternoon. An hour later, the indices were at session lows. We’ve crept up from there, but the Dow is -201 points, -0.51%, the S&P 500 is -0.27%, the Nasdaq came in at -0.18% and the small-cap -0.91%.
What was in the Fed minutes? Basically, that the lack of recent progress toward their +2% inflation objective has frustrated some of the FOMC members. There was even a willingness — on the part of some, not all — to actually raise rates in the future should risks to inflation materialize. Many of these concerns have been abated since, however: a somewhat shrinking labor force and a dwindling Consumer Price Index (CPI) shows that the economy appears to have righted its course in the past few weeks.
None of this really matters at this hour, anyway. NVIDIA NVDA, perhaps the world’s most important company as of today, has just reported Q1 earnings after today’s close. Unsurprisingly, the graphics chips innovator clobbered expectations on the bottom line — earnings of $6.12 per share, well above the $5.49 anticipated and a whopping +561% year over year. Revenues of $26.00 billion outpaced the $24.33 billion in the Zacks consensus.
Next-quarter revenue growth has been raised to roughly $28 billion, +/-1-2%. Q2 non-GAAP gross margins reached +75.5% in the quarter with record-setting Data Center revenues: $22.6 billion — nearly the full amount of sales NVIDIA had in the quarter — amounts to +23% growth quarter over quarter, and a jaw-dropping +427% year over year.
“The next industrial revolution has begun,” crowed CEO Jensen Huang. Further, the company is offering a 10 to 1 stock split to investors to go along with a cash dividend of 1 cent per share post-split. In short, this may be the most impressive earnings report since Steve Jobs was still making it rain for Apple AAPL.
NVIDIA isn’t the only A.I. play reporting earnings this afternoon. Montana-based Snowflake SNOW, a data cloud services firm with inroads to A.I., actually missed its bottom-line estimate by 3 cents to 14 cents per share. However, the growth-oriented firm hit a home run on the topline, with revenues of $828.7 million coming in well ahead of the consensus $787 million, for +33% revenue growth year over year. Not quite NVIDIA numbers, but shares are up +5% on the news. NVDA, incidentally, is up +4% in after-hours trading.
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