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Wednesday, May 14, 2025
Markets were mixed modestly in an overall uneventful trading day. (“Uneventful trading day”: it felt like a fresh breeze.) The Dow was down -60 points for the session, -0.14%, while the S&P 500 gained a mere +4 points, +0.07%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq kept its strong rally alive today, gaining +112 points or +0.59%, while the small-cap Russell 2000 dropped -15 points on the day, -0.74%.
Bond yields have been creeping up for most of the past two weeks or so. The 10-year currently sits at +4.54% and the 2-year is back over +4% to +4.06%. These two barometers of economic health have risen from +4.06% and +3.62%, respectively, we saw from these levels just two weeks ago.
Earnings Results After the Closing Bell
Cisco Systems CSCO kept its modest, routine and consistent earnings beats intact this afternoon after the close, with share of 96 cents per share beating expectations by a nickel. Revenues of $14.1 billion barely surpassed the expected $14.06 billion analysts were waiting for. Both next-quarter and full-year guidance was mildly raised in the company’s press release today. Shares are up +3.8% on the news in late trading.
Cisco’s Splunk acquisition, completed in March last year, added a healthy dollop of growth for the tech behemoth. Including the data pattern diagnostics provider, product growth for Cisco overall was +20%, but just +9% without Splunk. This acquisition was made for $28 billion in all cash, and now looks to be paying off. (You can see the full Zacks Earnings Calendar here.)
AI development provider CoreWeave CRWV is also out with earnings estimates — for Q1, in this case — with a widely off-the mark -$1.40 per share from -$0.18 expected on $981.63 million in revenues, which far surpassed the $850.38 million in the Zacks consensus. Such is life for newly formed publicly traded companies; CoreWeave had its IPO earlier this year. The company will provide forward guidance on the conference call.
What to Expect from the Stock Market Tomorrow
Plenty of economic reports hit the tape ahead of Thursday’s open: Retail Sales, Producer Price Index (PPI), Empire State and Philly Fed surveys, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization reports, Business Inventories and a new Homebuilder Confidence survey. These are all in addition to Weekly Jobless Claims, which come out nearly every Thursday morning.
Also, earnings reports are expected from Walmart WMT, Alibaba BABA, Deere & Co. DE and Birkenstock BIRK. With the retailers, we can tell we are now in the final stages of calendar Q1 earnings season. In all, we’ve seen some real challenges, especially in terms of forward guidance, but companies have generally held up fine in the first quarter. We shall see if this continues with the retailers in a still-uncertain global trade environment.
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