Markets Up Today and for the Week; Q1 from GOOGL, INTC, SKX

Thursday, April 24, 2025

Markets closed higher for the third-straight session today, with the Dow +486 points, +1.23%, the S&P 500 +108 points, +2.03%, the Nasdaq +457 points, +2.74% and the small-cap Russell 2000 up +38 points, +2.00%. Considering how this week started — with a heavy thud on threats to Jerome Powell’s job as Fed Chair — these indexes are up +2% to nearly +5% so far this week. Not too shabby.

Much of the good news was carried in the so-call “Magnificent 7” stocks today, with NVIDIA NVDA, Amazon AMZN, Tesla TSLA and Microsoft MSFT all up over +3% for the session. That said, these stocks are all way down year to date, from -8% at Microsoft to -35% at Tesla. It would appear investors are starting to price-in bottoms for these beloved tech stocks. 
 

Economic Reports Out Today: Existing Home Sales & More

After today’s open, Existing Home Sales for March came out at the lowest levels since October of last year: 4.02 million seasonally adjusted, annualized units were reported sold last month, below the 4.13 million anticipated and the 4.27 million units reported sold in February. Contrast this with yesterday’s higher-than-expected New Home Sales numbers, which gave people hope that maybe our housing crisis is behind us. Not so fast.

Before the open this morning, we saw strong Durable Goods Orders for March that appeared to have pulled forward some business ahead of the April 2nd tariff announcements, growing +9.2% from an estimated +1.6%. And Initial Jobless Claims stayed within their multi-week range at 222K, still a remarkably tame level considering the amount of layoffs we’ve seen from the federal government and elsewhere.
 

Q1 Earnings After the Close: GOOGL, INTC and SKX

Google and YouTube parent Alphabet GOOGL reported Q1 results after today’s closing bell, with both top and bottom lines positing significant beats. Earnings of $2.81 per share easily surpassed the $2.02 expected by analysts, on revenues (minus traffic acquisition costs [TAC], which the company does not cite on their headline) of $76.50 billion versus $75.53 billion in the Zacks consensus.

The company now totals 270 million paid subscribers overall. Cloud revenues bolted past year-ago tallies: $12.26 billion versus $9.57 billion in Q1 of 2024. YouTube ad revenue grew 90 basis points year over year to +8.93%. And Alphabet increased its quarterly dividend by +5% to 21 cents per share. New share buybacks totaled $70 billion.

Thus, shares are up +5% in the after-market, following +2.5% gains ahead of the earnings release. GOOGL is still trading down roughly -10% year to date.

Check out the updated Zacks Earnings Calendar here.

Intel INTC also outperformed expectations in its Q1 report this afternoon, with earnings of +$0.13 per share nicely bettering the $0.01 analysts had been looking for. Revenues, which had expected to be down -30% from last year’s numbers came in roughly flat, to $12.7 billion (ahead of the $12.3 billion estimate). But shares are down -5% in late trading on a pullback in next-quarter guidance.

Shoewear major Skechers SKX reported mixed results in its Q1 report after the bell, beating on the bottom line with earnings of $1.34 per share over the $1.18 expected, but revenues of $2.41 billion, while record-setting sales, came up shy of the $2.44 billion analysts had been projecting. The company is also withdrawing guidance based on “uncertainty stemming from global trade policies.” Shares are down -8% late.

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