News and analysis

Amazon.com (AMZN) shares are rebounding, gaining 9.6% over the past two weeks to reach $190. While this appears to be a strong move, prices have largely remained within this range for over a month. The stock experienced a sharp rally in December 2024, briefly breaking above the uptrend resistance. That move was followed by a four-month correction throughout early 2025.

However, the correction seems to have overextended, with prices ultimately touching the uptrend support and triggering a rebound. The current $175–190 range presents a potentially attractive buying opportunity, with an upside target of $220–225 - around 20% higher and just below the uptrend resistance. A reasonable stop-loss could be placed at $143.

The broader Wall Street has fully recovered from Donald Trump's April 2 tariff-threatening "Liberation Day". It is now back to the 5,700 mark in terms of the S&P 500 major barometer, which was last detected just before that great trade war act. However, some assets are reaching even higher February peaks already, being well ahead of the common recovery pace. Microsoft (MSFT) is certainly the biggest of the bright growth spots now.

Shares of Bill Gates' brainchild freshly reached nearly $440 last Friday, which was more than 11% up in intraday dynamics from just $395+ where it closed in April. High cloud demand makes the wind standing fair for Microsoft Azure business. Company's own forecast for its cloud profits are even higher than already achieved numbers. Price targets above $500 per unit look appropriate in this regard again.

The IT giant's revenue at its Azure cloud part actually added 33%, or even 35% in a constant currency calculation mode, in the last quarter ended March 31, even beating average estimates of a 29.7% rise. AI-related sales contributed nearly 16% to the growth, while it equalled 13% only three months before. Total quarterly revenue exceeded $70 billion for the first time in Microsoft's history, up more than $8 billion from less than $62 billion four quarters ago. The Intelligent Cloud unit, which houses Azure, contributed $26.8 billion, a 21% growth YoY. Productivity and Business Processes subdivision brought $29.9 billion (+10% YoY). Microsoft's total operating income increased 16% to $32 billion, while net income grew 18% to $25.8 billion. Earnings of $3.46 per share also broke the company's all-time record, while expert surveys were limited to expectations that it would remain at the levels marginally higher than $3.23 achieved in the last quarter of 2024 or maybe $3.3, which marked Q3 2024.

Commercial bookings on infrastructure and software contracts signed by customers grew as much as 18%, with a new Azure cloud contract with ChatGPT creator OpenAI as a main driving force, even though the particular sum of the latter is unknown and Microsoft officials declined to comment its size and role during the conference call to investors last week. Microsoft’s CFO Amy Hood only told investors that "the AI contribution" to the cloud computing business was "in line with the company’s expectations", while "the real outperformance in Azure this quarter was in our non-AI business". "The only real upside we saw on the AI side of the business was that we were able to deliver supply early to a number of customers," she added. Hood's puzzling behaviour just adjoined the crowd to buy more shares on hopes of more AI-related growth factors in the future.

Another reason was that some analysts recently lowered their expectations for Azure business as independent research reports showed ending some data centre lease obligations from Microsoft's side. It turned out that moderately lower estimates were not justified. CEO Satya Nadella said that Microsoft had a long history of constantly adjusting its data centre plans, but only in recent quarters had analysts started closely scrutinizing those moves. Beating estimates wouldn't have been this big if analysts didn't allow those underestimates before.

Microsoft now projects its cloud computing revenue growth of 34% to 35% on a constant currency basis for the current quarter, so that it may contribute between $28.75 billion and $29.05 billion to the overall sales figures. This inner forecast is also better than most optimistic estimates from the analyst pool at both Reuters and Bloomberg. Microsoft's market capitalization of nearly $3,25 trillion ranks first in the world, with Apple sliding down to less than $3.10 trillion on China-related supply cost worries and NVIDIA now at around $2.8 trillion even after its more than 25% bounce from April's lows.

ApeCoin (APE) is adding 1.8% this week to $0.498, outperforming the broader crypto market, where Bitcoin (BTC) is down 1.6% to $94,498. APE hit an all-time low of $0.348 in early April but has since rebounded, breaking above the key resistance level at $0.500. Prices are currently retesting this level, potentially setting the stage for a new upward move.

If the retest proves successful, APE could rally towards $1.000, supported by either progress in U.S.-China trade negotiations or a more dovish stance from the Federal Reserve.

Meta Platforms (META) is among the top tech gainers in early May, as this social media business has actually added nearly 8.7% to its market value in just two trading days since the latest release of its first quarter earnings. The premise behind such a strong bullish momentum is seemingly investors' cold math that a certain trade and therefore broader economic, tariff-induced instability stage could globally force advertisers to allocate larger parts of their budgets to proven mechanisms for promoting goods and services, including primarily Facebook and Instagram. Other, especially more risky, marketing campaigns can wait until better times, while budgets for Meta would grow. The numbers late on April 30 fully confirmed this bold assumption, and so the current local intraday peak of $604.34 per share doesn't look like a point for even temporarily pausing the bright rally.

Meta's total sales from the beginning of the year to the end of March was $42.31 billion against the average expert estimates preliminary at $41.5 billion only, which gave a 13.8% increase YoY on a quarterly basis against $36.46 billion reported on April 24 2024. Although this is still far from the all-time record of $48.39 billion in the traditionally best Christmas quarter, the quarter-by-quarter dynamics indicates that the high growth pace is continuing. The numbers became the second-highest ever for the company in terms of not only revenue but also profit, where +34.5% YoY gave Meta a whopping $16.44 billion for the quarter. That was equivalent to $6.43 in equity per share, or +22.7% over the $5.26 EPS expected in Wall Street's consensus polls. Meta's revenue for April through June could reach $45.5 billion at the high end of its own estimate, with $42.5 billion at the low end of expectations, which "reflected a decision to more rapidly ready data centre capacity as well as the potential for tariffs to increase hardware export costs", according to Meta CFO Susan Li. The crowd of traders could hardly have wished for anything better.

Family daily active people (DAP), which may be the most resistant metric, grew 6% YoY to 3.43 billion, and added 2.3%, or nearly 80 million users, over the past three months. Meta claims to be making rapid progress in cutting-edge areas such as the Meta AI app assistant and its AI glasses, where the number of users is approaching 1 billion. Meanwhile, current costs do not exceed expectations, as was the case with the first Metaverse projects of creating Meta's own fictional world in 2022, when the ambitiousness of tasks strained some shareholders, so that the company lost its value up to $100 per share. Supposed costs from $113 billion to $118 billion for all of 2025 are even $1 billion below previously estimated range that Meta had been guiding investors toward, despite plans to speed up construction of data centres for its AI features support. What was important, and Meta executives emphasized this point, the total capex was going mainly for supporting the core business, such as supplying the computing power for ads, rather than new generative AI development. But, of course, Meta also needs AI to improve its core ad targeting and recommendations to its social media users.

Now a perfect combination of lowering costs and rising profits clearly helps the stock to shine. The target range for further recovery of the market price between $665 and $700 looks like the most adequate scenario, if we forget for now about repeating Meta's all-time highs above $740, which were detected in mid-February, that is, also quite recently. This seems like a rational trading plan, as Meta still puts user engagement before turning to even more monetization and so higher price goals may be more suitable for long-term investments.