Microsoft raises Office prices, Robinhood extends earnings sell-off, Bitcoin and crypto stocks rally

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre reports on the day's trending tickers.

Video Transcript

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I want to turn to the markets now because it appears as though President Biden's remarks having a little impact on the rally we're seeing underway on Wall Street right now. All three major higher across the board with all 11 sectors in the S&P 500 helping to lead the advance today, technology and utilities really the standouts, though. The Dow is up better than 200 points. Great day for tech with the NASDAQ up 150, a gain there of more than 1%.

Speaking of tech, I want to bring in Jared Blikre for a look at one of those big tech names and that is Microsoft. Jared, I know they're going to be raising prices on their office products, and it looks like analysts like that move.

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. They have kept their prices at a flat level for years and years, I think going back to the beginning of the subscription service. And by the way, this is only for business customers, not for retail customers. Nobody who has a special education license is going to be affected.

So I want to take a look at the YFi interactive here, and we can see a lot of green on our software heat map. The one-- the big one, of course, is Microsoft. And just to get a quick look at the market cap, that's $2.28 trillion company, almost $2.3 trillion. Pretty impressive there.

Now, I'll pull up a chart, and I'll go to some of the analyst commentary. You can see right there, up 36%, 37% year to date, which is incredible for a $2.3 trillion stock. UBS rates it a buy. They raised their price target to $350 from $325, saying the price increase, quote, "materially improves our confidence in the fiscal year '23 and fiscal year '24 growth outlook.

Mizuho Securities saying-- and by the way, they have it with a buy. Price target has been raised to $350 from $250-- or $325. And they're saying, well, it takes some time to filter through the model. We expect these actions will have a significant financial impact in fiscal year '23 and beyond. Microsoft's growth opportunities, quote, "are greater than many realized." Again, this is a $2.3 trillion company. I can't say that enough.

Finally, Wedbush, which rates at an outperform, price target moved to $350 from $325, just like Mizuho, saying the price increase, quote, "was a smart strategic poker move" that could be another $5+ billion incremental tailwind in 2022. The move gives Wedbush more confidence that estimates will continue to move up.

And software has been performing pretty well as of late. You take a look at what's happened over the last month, more green than red there. And some of the leaders-- check this out. We got Atlassian Corporation, ticker TEAM, that's up 47% year to date. Paycom Software-- excuse me-- that's only up 4% year to date but did have a nice run for May. And we'll look at one more of our leaders, Datadogs-- still love that ticker-- up 33%, 34% year to date, Alexis.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, now something not up today with the rest of the market is Robinhood, lower for a second straight day, I guess after warning that that crypto-driven surge we saw in Q2 for Robinhood may not last.

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah, that's-- well, plus, they have analyst commentary coming on Monday. We're going to get a bunch of ratings for Robinhood, and that's because there has been a quiet period since that IPO. Now, this is a max chart. It goes back to that IPO, which was less than a month ago. You can see, still up 16%, but we've fallen pretty far off of the higher levels. If you take a look at a five-day chart, not the best week for Robinhood, down 15%. Concerns over what's going to happen in the third quarter with their trading revenue. But we know that crypto is an increasingly big proportion of their revenue book, and crypto is on the advance here.

Speaking of which, Alexis--

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: Yes, you know I was going to ask you about crypto. Yeah, you're right. I mean, Robinhood might be lower because of crypto-- their crypto news. But crypto in general, having a pretty nice day here and all of those ancillary stocks related to it. What's behind that?

JARED BLIKRE: Yeah, that's right. Bitcoin just advancing here, along with the other cryptocurrencies tokens. And this is the crypto stocks that we have. This is only one day's performance. But you can see, for instance, Marathon Patent Group-- there is an analyst note on that, actually, today-- concerning, kind of spooked the market. But then we had another analyst note kind of turn things around. Interesting story there. Anyway, that's up 11%.

And I want to go to our Bitcoin screen-- or our cryptocurrency screen here. And we can see Bitcoin almost to $49,000. That's very close to $50,000. That's a major threshold. And I was saying for months-- months-- that $45,000 to 47,000 had to hold. And now that we've gotten above that, I think it's almost safe to wave the all-clear for crypto, probably going to test those $62,000 highs again.

But I also want to point out some of the other coins. Cardano, that's up 10% today, 73% over the last two months. Ethereum up 6% today, 44% over the last two months. So a lot of these tokens really popping here today, Alexis.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: All right, thanks a lot, Jared. I want to get--