Amazon.com, Alphabet, Facebook, Microsoft — Market News

The Standard & Poor’s 500 Index advanced 1.1 per cent to 2075.15. The company also promised, as early as the next quarter, financial results to be more transparent than the usual “advertising” and “other” brackets. The big move followed better-than-expected results from benchmark heavyweights Microsoft, Amazon.com, and Alphabet. AWS says that its cloud related revenues shot up by 79% over the last quarter. “It’s frankly happening more than I’d expected or hoped for and I may have not been bullish enough about the resiliency of this market”, he said.

This story has been corrected to show the return on the Fidelity Cash Reserves Fund is 0.01 percent, not 0.1 percent. Broader S&P 500 futures edged up 0.1 percent to 2,055.40. The last time the Dow and S&P 500 delivered bigger single-day gains was October 5. The company posted a third-quarter profit of $3.98 billion, or $7.35 per share.

“Mario Draghi and his elves at the ECB practically confirmed there will be an early Christmas present in order for the European economy on 3 December”, Evan Lucas, a market strategist at IG, said in an email to clients.

Large tech companies becoming a hit commodity in the stock market is nothing new.

Beyond that, investors pored over the latest slate of company earnings, which helped put them in a buying mood. Facebook Inc. didn’t have any news and gained 3.3 percent to $102.94 anyway. Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 climbed 1.7 percent. “On the negative side, Pandora Media plummeted the most since going public in June 2011 after issuing a sales forecast that fell short of analysts” estimates and recording charges of $81.8 million to settle legal disputes with the music industry.

Texas Instruments’ earnings also beat projections.

The company is also turning heads with its purchase-in-a-click Dash buttons, original Prime Video series, Echo gadgets and six-packs of Kindle tablets. Both Amazon and Microsoft believe that their core offerings in the future will be cloud based, which can easily evidenced by the rapid booms in revenue reported by each company in their quarterly reports. Earnings are seen at US$1.879 per share.

Alphabet said the number of paid clicks, which require advertisers to pay only if a user clicks on the ad, rose 23 percent, compared with 18 percent in the previous quarter. The stock slid $16.02 to $30.17. Another issue, which the company didn’t bring up, is that the biggest players in cloud build much of their own equipment and write much of their own code.

“The bar has been raised a bit on its earnings report from where it was a week ago”. That’s better than the historic average of 66 percent, according to S&P Capital IQ. The sector is down 2.7 percent this year. Utilities stocks fell the most, down 1.7 percent. The FTSE 100 index of leading British shares gained 0.4 percent.

In China, the Shanghai Composite Index finished up 1.4 percent following a 3 percent slide Wednesday.

While technology stocks have led the market recovery, biotech stocks have been a drag on performance. The JPX-Nikkei Index 400 rose 2.1 percent to close at 13,878.26. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 0.6 percent. Brent Crude fell 9 cents to $47.99 a barrel in London.

The good feeling about earnings from these three companies lifted other big tech stocks, including Apple (+3.1 per cent), Facebook (+2.5 per cent) and Netflix (+2.8 per cent).