It appears to me that Wall Street simply closed its eyes to Netflix's quarterly report last Thursday, as the investing minds were too busy with more important stuff like IT stocks correction, a global crash of Windows and sleepy Joe Biden's decision to bow out of the presidential race. These all were very entertaining stories. Meanwhile, the world's largest online entertainment service added 8 million new subscribers from April through June to top average analyst projections of nearly 4.8 million, while the markets somehow lost this mind dazzling fact. The quotes only briefly jumped to $677.95 and then quickly returned to the area between $630 and $655 for the next two trading sessions.

A cool content slate, including titles like "Bridgerton'', "Baby Reindeer", "The Roast of Tom Brady" and Avatar: The Last Airbender family blockbuster, its ad-supported tier to form discounted subscription for most money conscious customers, and a very successful crackdown on password sharing helped the streaming giant to earn $4.88 per share on Q2 sales of $9.56 billion, beating consensus estimates of $4.74 on sales of $9.53 billion. In combination with 9.3 million subscribers who joined the service in Q1, this could strengthen an already solid foundation, consisting of more than 277 million viewers, under the lasting Netflix stock rally, even though its CEOs estimated Q3 2024 sales at slightly lower levels of $9.73 billion against market expectations of $9.82 billion. A well-built forecast on Q3 EPS of record $5.10 per share soaring above average market bets on $4.75 per share more than offsets possible flaws (or perceived flaws) in gross revenue forward guidance.

Ad tier membership rose by 34% from the prior quarter, while it was growing "nicely" to become a "more meaningful contributor to our business," according to a message from Netflix to investors. "Building a business from scratch takes time - and coupled with the large size of our subscription revenue - we don't expect advertising to be a primary driver of our revenue growth in 2024 or 2025", the official letter commented. It also informed the audience of the company's intention to release a computer game based on "Squid Game" "later this year", in sync with the second season of this very popular dystopian Korean series. Later, the games tied to "Emily in Paris" and "Selling Sunset" movies will be released as well.

Such a clear-cut case of inattention to strong business performance would look even strange, if not the current tech rotation background into smaller caps with additional uncertainty ahead of bellwethers' reports. Google-parent Alphabet (GOOG) and extremely volatile Tesla (TSLA) will be the first of them to announce their results. Surely, the further direction of the IT segment monsters may also affect the next move up or down by Netflix share price. Still, I see Netflix's path to $800, even if it has to slide to test its major technical support in the vicinity of $600 per share before the next round of climbing upstairs.