Markets Close at Pre-Market Highs; Airbnb Beats, RBLX & VIAC Miss
Before the opening bell this morning — prior to the very hot PPI numbers and very cool Empire State survey, in fact — news on Russia troops pulling back from the border of Ukraine had sent early morning indexes way up. They close roughly at the same levels: the Dow +422 points, +1.22%; the S&P 500 +1.58% and the Nasdaq did one better: +349 points, or +2.53%. Small-caps won the day, withe the Russell 2000 up +2.76% on the day.
This breaks a three-day losing streak for the indexes, which still shows them well-off all-time closing highs struck late last year and early this year. Investors have been busy pricing-in a near-certain 50 basis-point hike in interest rates a month from now; PPI numbers from today and CPI figures from last week do nothing but help further solidify these notions.
After the close, Airbnb ABNB is climbing another +5% following a solid Q4 beat on both earnings and sales: 8 cents per share outpaced the Zacks consensus by 3 cents — and clearly recovering from the dastardly -$10.88 per share reported in the year-ago quarter — while revenues of $1.53 billion surpasses $1.46 billion expected. The Average Daily Rate grew +20% year over year, +36% over Q4 2019.
Bookings guided higher for Q1, and so have revenues: to a range of $1.4-1.48 billion from $1.27 billion our analysts had been looking for. The San Francisco-based vacation rentals company has now beaten earnings estimates three quarters in a row, and its stock is up nearly +10% so far year to date.
Roblox RBLX, on the other hand, is down -13% on big misses for both top and bottom lines in its Q4: -25 cents per share nearly doubled the -13 cents expected in the Zacks consensus. Quarterly sales came in at $568.8 million — well below the $763.11 million analysts had been anticipating. Daily Active Users (DAU) was in-line with estimates, and growth is expected to pick up. Will the monetization follow?
ViacomCBS VIAC announced a coming name change and ticker symbol as well as its Q4 earnings results. The entertainment giant, to be known as Paramount Global, whose “B” shares will trade under the ticker PARA as of Thursday, posted mixed figures for the quarter: 26 cents per share on $8.00 billion in revenues compare with the 38 cents on $7.47 billion expected for the quarter. Shares are giving back roughly -4% of its +11.6% gains year to date.
Tomorrow brings us a very busy day for market news. Aside from NVIDIA NVDA earnings, we’ll also see Retail Sales, Import Prices, Industrial Production/Capacity Utilization — all for January. And this is before mentioning we’ll also get to read the minutes from the last Fed meeting, which will give us some insights on Fed voting member concerns about inflation in the economy — even before the latest CPI and PPI numbers had come out.
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