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Amazon Crushes Earnings: 3x YOY; Twitter Sags on DAU Miss

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In what is shaping up to be the strongest trading month since November of last year, on the second-to-last trading day in April, the S&P 500 has set another new record high closing price to 4211, +0.68% on the day. The Dow performed slightly better on the day, +0.72%, while the Nasdaq finished 0.22% in positive territory. The small-cap Russell 2000 made it a clean sweep for the indexes Thursday.

The final FAANG stock to report, Amazon (AMZN - Free Report) , put up similarly stellar numbers to its sister stocks Alphabet (GOOGL - Free Report) and Apple (AAPL - Free Report) after the closing bell. It absolutely destroyed the bottom-line consensus of $9.75 per share with a headline of $15.79 — more than triple earnings from the year-ago quarter. Revenues of $108.5 billion swept past the $105.2 billion anticipated. Shares of the e-commerce staple popped 5% immediately after the release.

Further, revenue guidance for Q2 has been increased notably, from $108 billion expected in the Zacks consensus prior to this report to a range of $110-116 billion. Expect analyst revisions to commence right away. Almost everywhere you look — AWS, Amazon Prime, Advertising — outperformed expectations in the quarter. Only Physical Stores came in light of expectations. The company also noted expenses related to Covid contagion will continue to lessen in Q2.

Amazon, in the year-ago quarter, actually missed expectations on the bottom line, but with the subsequent three earnings reports had a 4-quarter trailing average beat of 160%. That’s right in line with this quarter’s earnings beat, as well.

While we have begun to see some waning among those companies best prepared to handle pandemic conditions, this does not seem to apply to Amazon. At all. This was a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company with a Value - Growth - Momentum grade of A before the earnings report.

Twitter , on the other hand, is down 9% in the late session following its Q1 earnings release, even with slight beats on both top and bottom lines: 16 cents per share outperformed expectations by 2 cents, while $1.04 billion in revenues eked past the $1.03 billion estimate. Monetizable Daily Active Users (MDAU) came in slightly short of expectations of 200 million, while Q2 sales guidance had dipped a tad. The company still holds its goal of doubling revenues by 2023.

Marquee tech names may be finished reporting, but Q1 earnings season is just getting revved up. If industries yet to report can come close to the mammoth beats we’ve seen in select Big Tech and Big Bank names so far, this may be the strongest reporting quarter in recent memory — with plenty of upside for the June quarter.

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