Wall Street up, even as indices significantly reduce the strong gains reported in the premarket, as Nasdaq futures jumped more than 2%.
Protagonist among the Meta titles, the holding company to which the social networks Facebook and Instagram and the messaging APP WhatsApp belong, which reported yesterday after the end of the session a better-than-expected quarterly report.
Meta Platforms stock shot up + 18% after the release of the balance sheet. However, the giant’s prices remain down by 48% since the beginning of the year.
At around 4 pm Italian time, the Dow Jones rises by just + 0.10% to 33.335; the S&P 500 is up 0.53% to 4,206 while the Nasdaq is + 0.55% to 12,567. Meta leaps by about 13.5%.
The Wall Street trend remains negative since the beginning of April; with the S&P 500 down 6.8%, towards the strongest monthly loss since March 2020; the Nasdaq Composite collapsed by almost -11%, which is about to end the worst month since October 2008 and the Dow Jones which limited the damage to a loss of -4%.
Buy also on McDonald’s, Merck, Eli Lilly and Southwest stocks after related companies disclosed market-promoted financial results; as well as Qualcomm stocks, + 8% after the publication of a positive balance sheet, and PayPal + 3% approximately, despite the group active in the management of payments has issued a weak guidance for the second quarter of the year.
Waiting for the financial results to be released after the end of the session by Apple, Amazon, as well as by Robinhood.
Shock from the macroeconomic front with the publication of the preliminary reading of US GDP for the first quarter of 2022.
The US gross domestic product fell in the first three months of the year by 1.4%, doing much worse than the 1% rise expected by the consensus, and after the growth trend of + 6.9% at annualized pace recorded in the fourth quarter of 2021.
The turnaround in US growth was also caused by the beginning of the war in Ukraine, with the invasion of the country by Vladimir Putin’s Russia launched on 24 February. The contraction was caused in particular by the components of trade and inventories, which subtracted 2.3 pp and 0.84 percentage points respectively from US GDP.
At this point, the question arises whether expectations on a particularly aggressive Fed on the rate front will continue to hold, given that second-quarter US GDP figures are expected to worsen further, due to the effects of the war in Ukraine.
Returning to Meta, the giant announced that earnings per share for the first quarter of the year stood at $ 2.72, better than the $ 2.56 expected; revenue was $ 27.91 billion, down from an estimated $ 28.2 billion. The number of daily active users was 1.96 billion, against the expected 1.95 billion, while the monthly active users were 2.94 billion, against the estimated 2.97 billion. Average revenue per user (ARPU) stood at $ 9.54, better than the expected $ 9.50. Several balance sheet items disregarded estimates, and revenue, up 7%, posted single-digit growth on a percentage basis for the first time in Facebook’s ten-year history, making it worse than +7 among other things. , 8% expected by the consensus.
For the second quarter of the year, Meta announced that it expects revenue between $ 28 billion and $ 30 billion, lower than the $ 30.6 billion expected by analysts. But the stock in the premarket continues to run by around 16%.