新闻和分析

The share price of the U.S. and multinational home improvement retailer Home Depot initially jumped $10, from under $380 to nearly $390, or 2.5%, in the first few minutes after the opening bell on May 20. The price later dropped to test the $380+ area again, but was bought back to climb by nearly 2% once again. This probably consolidated the overall positive contribution of the corporation's quarterly earnings released that day to a more than 15% rising tide since its April 9's low at $328.60, when the market just got rid of the scourge of global tariff war in its most acute form.

Home Depot's sales clearly beats the analyst pool's estimates. Its overall comparable sales slid by 0.3% in the last three months, but reportedly hurt by weaker results in February because of improper weather. All in all, the company posted net sales of $39.86 billion, that is 1.5% better vs average expectations of $39.25 billion, according to data compiled by LSEG. At the same time, adjusted EPS (equity per share) came out at $3.56 vs $3.60 expected and $3.63 in the same season of 2024, but all those numbers look much higher than the one-off drop in profit numbers to only $3.13 per share in the Christmas quarter.

Two points were seemingly most important for keeping the investment sentiment on a positive side. The first point is that The Home Depot promised to hold its consumer prices unchanged despite tariffs' threat, citing resilient demand from professional contractors to lead to maintaining its former annual forecast unchanged. The other one is that the company's CFO Richard McPhail ensured that in the next 12 months, no single country outside the U.S. will represent more than 10% of its purchases", after it has cut its previously high exposure to China substantially in recent years. A well-diversified supply chain strategy should help Home Depot to "generally maintain current pricing levels across its portfolio", he added.

The HD's oath to keep prices steady are especially vital in contrast to Walmart’s warning only several days before that the major U.S. discounter may have to implement higher prices tags due to tariffs, which immediately drew the ire of U.S. president Donald Trump, who claimed that Walmart should "eat" the import tariffs and not to pass on the costs to consumers. This public controversy hasn't actually stopped Walmart from continuing its upside rally, but Walmart appears to have much more fundamental reasons for growth, and so a similar story with Home Depot could hurt its stock's performance.

Now, even though Home Depot could hardly be called a stable growth stock and it may be subject to moderate volatility as before, the Home Depot's ultimate price targets above $425, just corresponding to its January's highs of 2025, still prove their right to be kept in mind for the rest of the year. This happens despite some consumer-facing companies have shared rather sad quarterly results, pulling down their YoY forecasts.

Without much further ado I present to you another favourite crypto asset of mine at the moment, which is Aave. The thing is that Aave digital token is initially related to a decentralized lending platform. It allows crypto adepts to borrow and lend against crypto collateral without any involvement of traditional banking institutions. This is the so-called DeFi (Decentralized Finance) system, which has a potential to gain more rising momentum as interest rates in the Euro and the US Dollars would go down further. The project is based on the Ethereum blockchain to operate through smart contracts' mechanisms in order to ensure the automatic execution of transaction terms. The current market cap is over $3 billion. The maximum supply of Aave tokens is algorithmically capped at 16 million, with about 80% of those already in circulation. This cap helps maintain the value of the token. Aave tokens can be staked through special security modules, which acts as a joint insurance fund to reduce risks where the token holders receive additional rewards for helping to secure the protocol.

The highly reputable Bernstein investment house believes that Aave has a chance to exceed $300 by 2030, as lending yields for stablecoins are ranging from 3.7% to 3.9%. The fact that the Federal Reserve is gearing up to cut interest rates later through 2025 makes DeFi yields more attractive again, they said, being a catalyst to reboot crypto credit markets. "For example, if plain vanilla lending USDC stablecoin offered a 3% yield, the free token incentives would juice the yield to 15-20%," the same group of analysts explained in late 2024, even though these high yields could be unsustainable, of course. As interest rates increased in 2022-2023, even standard USDC yields became less attractive compared to US money market yields, but the situation may transform in favour of credit tokens when interest rates become lower. This means the crypto lending markets are waking up. Aave is surely the largest lending market based on Ethereum. Bernstein noted that the number of unique monthly DeFi users has approximately tripled or quadrupled in 2023-2024, with the supply of fiat-backed stable coins in circulation hitting a new high of $158 billion by September 2024.

Many analyst estimates on Binance crypto platform are $100 to $150 higher, while the asset has already grown from nearly $180 to more than $260 since the beginning of May, that is, by a total of 44%, including a sudden spike in demand to drive Aave by around 20% over the past 24 hours. I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to join this crowd of those thirsty for quick money on any minor 3% to 5% intraday corrective move in Aave. With the rising flag's technical pattern on H1 and H4 charts here, freshly broken upside today, my chances of a successful outcome are even higher.

Binance Coin (BNB) is up 0.97% to $648 this week, performing closely in line with the broader crypto market, where Bitcoin (BTC) has gained 1.10% to $105,206. BNB has been hovering around the $600 support level since February and resumed its upward trajectory in May, supported by improving overall market sentiment. Despite limited momentum, the altcoin is maintaining levels near its all-time high of $793.98, indicating strong underlying demand. Binance’s ongoing growth as a crypto exchange continues to support its native coin, with a base-case upside scenario pointing to a move toward the $700 resistance, potentially followed by a push to new record highs.

Verizon (VZ) shares have been trading within a narrow range of $41 to $45 over the past three months, showing notable resilience even during the broader 14% market correction in April. This stability highlights the stock's defensive nature and suggests a potential buildup of upside momentum.

Currently, Verizon is consolidating within an emerging upward formation, with firm trend support in the $42–44 range. This support zone has been tested and has held strong, reinforcing its credibility. If the stock manages to break out from this consolidation phase, it could move toward the next resistance zone at $50–52.

From a technical standpoint, accumulating within the $42–44 range appears favourable, supported by the stock's relative strength against broader market volatility. A prudent stop-loss could be placed at $36 to manage downside risk.