MSFT - Microsoft Corporation
162.45 +0.17 (0.10%)
After hours: 7:57PM EST
| Previous close | 165.04 |
| Open | 161.15 |
| Bid | 162.32 x 1400 |
| Ask | 162.46 x 800 |
| Day's range | 160.21 - 163.37 |
| 52-week range | 102.17 - 168.19 |
| Volume | 32,078,067 |
| Avg. volume | 21,650,632 |
| Market cap | 1.238T |
| Beta (5Y monthly) | 1.23 |
| PE ratio (TTM) | 30.62 |
| EPS (TTM) | 5.30 |
| Earnings date | 28 Jan 2020 |
| Forward dividend & yield | 2.04 (1.24%) |
| Ex-dividend date | 18 Feb 2020 |
| 1y target est | 173.97 |
- Yahoo Finance
Why Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway is a hot stock pick for millennials
Berkshire Hathaway landed on millennials’ top 10 list of investments in the fourth quarter of 2019, according to new research.
- TechCrunch
Kidtech startup SuperAwesome raises $17M, with strategic investment from Microsoft's M12 venture fund
Kidtech startup SuperAwesome has raised an additional $17 million in funding, which includes a new strategic investment from Microsoft's venture fund, M12. Others participating in the round include existing investors Mayfair Equity, Hoxton Ventures and Ibis, along with other angels. To date, SuperAwesome has raised $37 million in outside investment.
- Zacks
Facebook Q4 Preview: Buy FB Stock Before Earnings?
Investors need to know what to expect from Facebook's Q4 financial results and beyond to help understand what might be next for Facebook stock...
- Zacks
Buy Surging Apple & Microsoft Stock Before Quarterly Earnings?
On today's episode of Full Court Finance here at Zacks, we dive into everything investors need to know about Apple and Microsoft stock to help figure out if either tech giant is worth buying heading into quarterly earnings...
- Zacks
Tech Daily: Intel Results, Netflix Surge, Apple Valuation, Google-ATVI Deal, More
The top stories in this digest are Intel's earnings, Netflix's surging share price, Apple's valuation concerns and the Google-Activision deal.
- Zacks
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Intel are part of Zacks Earnings Preview
Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon and Intel are part of Zacks Earnings Preview
- Zacks
Is iShares MSCI ACWI Low Carbon Target ETF (CRBN) a Strong ETF Right Now?
Smart Beta ETF report for CRBN
- Bloomberg
The Alphabet Soup of Responsible Investing Needs a Good Stir
(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Investors continue to pour funds into passive investment products that aim to replicate the performance of benchmark indexes. They’re also increasingly keen that their money gets used to influence corporations to stop damaging the planet and improve social inclusiveness. Unfortunately, many of the products designed to achieve both objectives currently fall short on the goal of responsible investing.The shift in emphasizing environmental, social and governance issues puts pressure on the index providers to come up with benchmarks that more accurately reflect the concerns investors are attempting to express by allocating capital to ESG investment products. Currently, though, even dedicated ESG indexes have shortcomings that many investors are probably unaware of.The U.S. Vegan Climate exchange-traded fund, for example, tracks a $124 billion index created by Beyond Investing that excludes companies engaged in a laundry list of potentially harmful activities, including animal exploitation, human rights abuses and fossil fuels extraction. While the $14 million ETF’s top five holdings — Apple Inc., Microsoft Corp., Facebook Inc., Visa Inc. and Mastercard Inc. — may all meet those criteria, they’re hardly the first names that spring to mind when thinking about the words vegan or climate. And there are many other examples.BlackRock Inc.’s announcement this month that it plans to prioritize sustainability in its investment decisions highlights the issue confronting index trackers. With two-thirds of its $7.4 trillion of assets managed passively, the world’s biggest asset manager acknowledged that the bulk of its cash isn’t available to pursue those goals. Harnessing that firepower will become increasingly important if the passive industry is to meet the ESG aspirations of its growing customer base.It’s even likely to radically change the industry, and sooner than people realize. To that point, Hiro Mizuno, the chief investment officer of Japan’s $1.6 trillion Global Pension Investment Fund, says the days are over when it’s enough for passive fund managers to compete simply on providing the lowest tracking errors at the lowest cost. Now they have to add value too. “The main battlefield among our passive managers is going to be in the stewardship area.” he told the Financial Times last month. BlackRock is far from alone in shifting to a more moral investing stance. A survey of 300 institutional investors, financial advisers and fund managers that use ETFs published on Monday by Brown Brothers Harriman & Co. showed that almost three-quarters of respondents expect to increase the amount allocated to ESG investments in the coming year.European participants in the BBH survey ranked ESG-themed products as the ETF category they would most like to see more supply of, while Chinese investors ranked the sector as their second most desired area of expansion, along with more funds designed to track core indexes.Money is flooding into the sector. ESG-designated assets were the fastest-growing category of ETFs listed on Deutsche Boerse AG’s Xetra market last year, with investments more than tripling to more than 23 billion euros ($25 billion). Globally, ESG ETFs have enjoyed net inflows for 52 consecutive weeks, taking in $30 billion in the past year and garnering almost $3.4 billion in the week ended Jan. 20, according to data compiled by Bloomberg LP, which competes in selling index data to investors.There are two main routes whereby ETF providers can meet the implicit demands of clients allocating money to passively managed ESG products. The first is to use their collective muscle to prompt index providers to increase the granularity of the benchmarks used to shape asset allocations. Improving the discrimination of ESG indexes would go a long way to ensuring investors aren’t being hoodwinked into products that aren’t as green or socially savvy as they first appear.The second is trickier. Excluding companies deemed to be damaging the environment or being socially irresponsibly isn’t enough to move the needle. Engaging with the boards of those firms and using the clout of a shareholding to force them to change their ways is much more effective.But that costs money, and the success of the ETF model has been founded in large part on its ability to charge ultra-low fees. If BlackRock and its peers are serious about taking their social responsibilities more seriously, investors will have to pay for the privilege — and the sellers of index trackers will need to be honest about the increased cost of that kind of activism. Let’s hope the buyers of the products decide it’s a price worth paying to do good.To contact the author of this story: Mark Gilbert at magilbert@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Melissa Pozsgay at mpozsgay@bloomberg.netThis column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.Mark Gilbert is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering asset management. He previously was the London bureau chief for Bloomberg News. He is also the author of "Complicit: How Greed and Collusion Made the Credit Crisis Unstoppable."For more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.com/opinionSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
World About to Learn If $1 Trillion Tech Rally Was a Good Idea
(Bloomberg) -- Companies in the Nasdaq 100 are headed into earnings season with momentum that approaches the unprecedented, their value up by more than $1 trillion since October.Now the world finds out if the rally made any sense.Twenty-six constituents are due to report quarterly results next week, including three of the four biggest U.S. companies, over one blistering 48-hour stretch starting Tuesday. With trillion-dollar-plus market capitalizations and a doubling in Apple Inc. since 2018 to account for, it’s possible investors will be in a less-forgiving mood than usual.As things stand now, Nasdaq stocks are perched at the highest forward valuation since 2007 and investors are getting progressively less patient with failure. Already this reporting season, companies in the broader market whose sales and earnings trailed analyst estimates have seen their shares pummeled the next day by the most in five quarters.“The market isn’t going parabolic, but some of these tech stocks really have,” said Randy Frederick, a vice president of trading and derivatives at Charles Schwab. “If you miss the bar, you’re going to get punished, no question about that.”A four-day week before the landing of big tech earnings saw the Nasdaq 100 slip 0.4% as stocks wavered amid concern over the spread of a virus that started in China. Seven straight weeks of gains have pushed the index to 23 times its forecast earnings, about 30% higher than its 10-year average. That valuations are stretched doesn’t mean stocks can’t rally further. It does raise the drama headed into earnings season.The latest leg of the bull market has come at a time when overall earnings have stopped rising for most industries -- the reason valuations have swelled so much. While the index rose every quarter of 2019 in terms of price, profits fell in two and are now forecast to contract in a third. Given the Nasdaq surged 38%, investors have obviously been OK looking past those numbers. But any indication that 2020’s expectations are optimistic may be taken poorly by stock bulls.That dynamic is writ large in the tech industry, where earnings have dropped 3% or more in each of the past three quarters. Computer and software makers are expected to post a 0.8% profit contraction in the three months through December. Early returns have been encouraging. Texas Instruments, a bellwether for chip stocks, posted results that topped estimates. Intel Corp. reported sales guidance that came in above industry trends.Despite the recent quarterly hiccups, combined net income of five largest tech companies -- Apple, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Facebook -- totaled $40 billion in the third quarter, 38% above the same period two years ago.“Multiples have expanded, but quarter-over-quarter these companies continue to grow earnings and that’s the whole key,” said Gary Bradshaw, a Texas-based portfolio manager at Hodges Capital Management, who owns shares of Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook. “It’s one of the areas in the marketplace where you’re seeing good growth. This isn’t 1999 or 2000 when you were valuating those tech stocks on eyeballs.”The cost of falling short has risen as well. A broader gauge of tech, online retail and Internet services stocks dropped 0.9% the day after reporting a miss on second-quarter sales and earnings per share, data compiled by Credit Suisse show. In the third quarter, the average slump was 6.8%.Apple will release quarterly figures on Tuesday, and analysts are focused on how the firm fared during the holiday season and dealt with uncertainty around tariffs. Microsoft, up 62% since the start of 2019, reports Wednesday. Investors will see whether the demand for its cloud-computing programs remains strong. Facebook, which has rallied 66% over that stretch, reports the same day.“I’d expect a little more leadership out of value-oriented sectors, more economically sensitive parts of the market,” Jeff Kleintop, chief global investment strategist at Schwab Center for Financial Research, said by phone. “I think investors seem to be comfortable with sticking with the leaders that got them here, at least for the time being,”\--With assistance from Wendy Soong.To contact the reporters on this story: Elena Popina in Hong Kong at epopina@bloomberg.net;Sarah Ponczek in New York at sponczek2@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Brad Olesen at bolesen3@bloomberg.net, Chris Nagi, Richard RichtmyerFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Yahoo Finance
What drove user interest and what can we expect moving forward?
As we kick off 2020, we're taking a look at the past year's most popular stocks and the trends that fueled them. To do this, we took a peek within our award-winning technical analysis product Technical Insight to see which U.S. instruments yielded the highest search rate from our global investor base throughout 2019.
- Bloomberg
YouTube Gets Streaming Rights to Major Esports Leagues
(Bloomberg) -- YouTube secured the exclusive rights to broadcast some of the biggest esports leagues, giving Google a boost in its efforts to push into the lucrative world of video games.The deal, signed between Alphabet Inc.’s Google and video game publisher Activision Blizzard Inc., gives YouTube the rights to broadcast the new Call of Duty League and the already-popular Overwatch League, which was broadcast on Amazon.com Inc.’s Twitch for the past two years at a reported cost of $90 million. As part of the agreement, Google will provide cloud infrastructure for Activision’s online games. Financial terms of the multiyear deal were not disclosed.Gaming is a significant new frontier for Google. Last year, it released a game-streaming service called Stadia, which lets people play games through the internet without having to buy a console or high-powered computer. YouTube has always been a major destination for watching people play video games, but the company is trying to take even more territory by poaching well-known game players from Twitch.‘All-Out Talent War’ in Video Gaming Sparked by Ninja Defection“In 2020 Google is going all out to claim a piece of the $120 billion games market,” said Joost van Dreunen, managing director of Nielsen’s video-game research arm. “Google is off to a great start to building strong relationships with content creators which it will need to differentiate as it tries to penetrate the industry via different avenues.”The news isn’t good for Amazon, which hasn’t announced a competitor to Stadia and still faces uncertainty about its in-house gaming studio, van Dreunen said. “The longer Amazon remains on the sidelines of technological shifts in the games business, the harder it will be to capture share down the line,” he said.The deal offers a strong boost to the central thesis of Activision’s esports efforts. The publisher pitched investors on the Overwatch League and the Call of Duty League, which launches later this month, as esports equivalents to traditional sports leagues like the National Basketball Association or National Football League. Selling media rights to companies like YouTube is a central piece of how these leagues make money.Providing hosting services to Activision is also a win for Google’s cloud division, which is trailing Amazon and Microsoft Corp. in that market.(Updates with comment from analyst in the fourth paragraph.)\--With assistance from Eben Novy-Williams.To contact the reporter on this story: Gerrit De Vynck in New York at gdevynck@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.net, Andrew PollackFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Reuters
Wall Street Week Ahead: Hopes are high for tech stock 'Cadillacs'; so are their prices
Wall Street is betting that the most popular U.S. technology and internet stocks can keep outshining the broader equities market but their latest rally leaves little room for error this earnings season. Investors dashed for the exits after Tuesday's less-than-stellar quarterly report from Netflix - the N in FAANG - an acronym for the group of U.S. tech companies that have been the biggest drivers of the bull market. Hopes remained high for the other FAANGs - Facebook, Apple, Amazon.com and Google parent Alphabet, as well as Microsoft, ahead of their financial reports.
- Zacks
Will GPU Adoption & EPYC Deal Wins Aid AMD's Q4 Earnings?
Robust adoption of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) graphics cards and EPYC deal wins are expected to have driven top-line growth in fourth-quarter 2019.
- Zacks
Factors Setting the Tone for Microsoft's (MSFT) Q2 Results
Microsoft's (MSFT) fiscal second-quarter results are likely to reflect gains from strength in Azure and robust adoption of business productivity offerings.
- Reuters
Bytedance's TikTok hires Microsoft IP chief as general counsel
Popular mobile video app TikTok said on Friday it has hired attorney Erich Andersen from Microsoft to serve as the company's global general counsel, reporting to president Alex Zhu. Andersen was most recently Microsoft's chief intellectual property counsel, bringing expertise in an area of key concern to TikTok as it builds out its music offerings. TikTok, owned by Chinese tech company ByteDance, allows users to create and share short videos that can be set to snippets of songs from its music library.
- Bloomberg
Tech CEOs in Davos Dodge Issues by Warning Audiences About AI
(Bloomberg) -- Sign up here to receive the Davos Diary, a special daily newsletter that will run from Jan. 20-24.Technology’s most influential leaders have a new message: It’s not us you need to worry about -- it’s artificial intelligence.Two years ago big tech embarked on a repentance tour to Davos in response to criticism about the companies’ role in issues such as election interference by Russia-backed groups; spreading misinformation; the distribution of extremist content; antitrust violations; and tax avoidance. Uber Technologies Inc.’s new chief even asked to be regulated.These problems haven’t gone away -- last year tech’s issues were overshadowed by the world’s --- but this time executives warned audiences that AI that must be regulated, rather than the companies themselves.“AI is one of the most profound things we’re working on as humanity. It’s more profound than fire or electricity,” Alphabet Inc. Chief Executive Officer Sundar Pichai said in an interview at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland on Wednesday. Comparing it to international discussions on climate change, he said, “You can’t get safety by having one country or a set of countries working on it. You need a global framework.”The call for standardized rules on AI was echoed by Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty.“I think the U.S. and China and the EU having a set of principles that governs what this technology can mean in our societies and the world at large is more in need than it was over the last 30 years,” Nadella said.It’s an easy argument to make. Letting companies dictate their own ethics around AI has led to employee protests. Google notably decided to withdraw from Project Maven, a secret government program that used the technology to analyze images from military drones, in 2018 after a backlash. Researchers agree.“We should not put companies in a position of having to decide between ethical principles and bottom line,” said Stefan Heumann, co-director of think tank Stiftung Neue Verantwortung in Berlin. “Instead our political institutions need to set and enforce the rules regarding AI.”The current wave of AI angst is also timely. In a few weeks the EU is set to unveil its plans to legislate the technology, which could include new legally binding requirements for AI developers in “high-risk sectors,” such as health care and transport, according to an early draft obtained by Bloomberg. The new rules could require companies to be transparent about how they build their systems.Warning the business elite about the dangers of AI has meant little time has been spent at Davos on recurring problems, notably a series of revelations about how much privacy users are sacrificing to use tech products. Amazon.com Inc. workers were found to be listening in to people’s conversations via their Alexa digital assistants, Bloomberg reported last year, leading EU regulators to look at more ways to police the technology. In July, Facebook Inc. agreed to pay U.S. regulators $5 billion to resolve the Cambridge Analytica data scandal. And in September Google’s YouTube settled claims that it violated U.S. rules, which ban data collection on children under 13.Read more: Thousands of Amazon Workers Are Listening to What You Tell AlexaPrivacy DebateInstead of apologies over privacy violations, big tech focused on how far it has come in the past few years in terms of looking after personal data.Facebook Vice President Nicola Mendelsohn said in an interview with Bloomberg Television on Friday that the company has rolled out standards similar to Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation in other markets.“Let’s be very clear, we already have regulation, GDPR,” Mendelsohn said in response to a question about the conversations Facebook is having with regulators. “We didn’t just do it in Europe where it was actually regulated. We thought it was a very considered and useful way of thinking about things so we actually rolled a lot of that out around the world as well.”Keith Enright, Google’s chief privacy officer, also spoke at a separate conference in Brussels this week about how the company is working to find ways to minimize the amount of customer data it needs to collect.“We’re right now really focused on doing more with less data,” Enright said at a data-protection conference on Wednesday. “This is counter-intuitive to a lot of people, because the popular narrative is that companies like ours are trying to amass as much data as possible.”Holding on to data that isn’t delivering value for users is “a risk,” he said.But regulators are still devising on new laws to protect user data. The U.S. is working on federal legislation that calls for limits on sharing customer information and, similar to GDPR, require companies get consent from consumers before sharing data with third parties. Facebook, Amazon, Apple Inc. and Microsoft all increased the amount they spent on lobbying in Washington last year, with some of those funds going to pushing industry-friendly privacy bills.And even though tech executives called for AI rules, they still cautioned against regulating too much, too fast. Pichai reminded lawmakers that existing rules may already apply in many cases. Lawmakers “don’t need to start from scratch” he said.\--With assistance from Nate Lanxon and Stephanie Bodoni.To contact the reporters on this story: Amy Thomson in London at athomson6@bloomberg.net;Natalia Drozdiak in Brussels at ndrozdiak1@bloomberg.netTo contact the editors responsible for this story: Giles Turner at gturner35@bloomberg.net, Jillian WardFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Bloomberg
Intel Gains as Data Center Revival Fuels Revenue Growth
(Bloomberg) -- Intel Corp. gave bullish quarterly and full-year revenue forecasts, driven by a surge in demand for chips that power large cloud-computing centers. The shares jumped as much as 7.8% in late trading.Sales in the current quarter and in 2020 will be well above what analysts had predicted and are outpacing normal industry trends, the chipmaker said on Thursday. Fourth-quarter revenue and profit also topped Wall Street’s highest estimates. As the biggest provider of server chips, Intel is benefiting from a rush to build capacity in data centers operated by companies such as Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc’s AWS.“We’re well ahead of our expectations in the quarter and it’s continuing into this year,” Chief Financial Officer George Davis said in an interview. “That’s just a great dynamic.”Revenue from cloud-service providers, which offer computing power and storage via the internet, surged 48% in the fourth quarter, fueling a gain in sales of the company’s most lucrative chips. A spike in demand from these buyers is helping to ease concerns that Intel was losing its technology leadership in computer processors and faced a competitive threat from customers’ own development efforts. Some high-end server chips cost more than compact car.Revenue in the current period will be about $19 billion, and profit will be $1.23 a share, excluding certain items, Intel said. That compares with average analysts’ projections for $17.2 billion and $1.04 a share. Sales in 2020 will be about $73.5 billion, the company said late Thursday in a statement. Analysts were looking for $72.2 billion on average, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.The company’s annual forecast implies growth will abate in the second half of the year, Davis said. Big purchases from data-center owners tend to come in lumps, followed by slower periods when the components are being built into computers.“The hard part is forecasting when they’re going to slow down and digest,” he said.Fourth-quarter sales rose 8% to $20.2 billion, the Santa Clara, California-based company said. Analysts on average had predicted $19.2 billion. Net income was $6.9 billion, or $1.58 a share, compared with estimates for $1.23 a share. Gross margin, or the percentage of sales remaining after deducting the cost of production, was 58.8% in the quarter.The largest U.S. chipmaker has fallen behind rivals in semiconductor-manufacturing technology, sparking concern on Wall Street about sales growth and future profit. In November, the company told PC customers inventory remained tight because of limited manufacturing capacity. Still, executives have said that Intel is targeting a broader range of markets and the company has plenty of room to expand in new areas, such as networking and the auto industry.Intel will increase spending on new plants and equipment to $17 billion in 2020 in part to boost production to a point where it’s not only able to fill all customer orders, but build inventory, Chief Executive Officer Bob Swan said on a conference call. After again failing to meet all demand in the fourth quarter, avoiding a repeat of that mistake is one of his biggest priorities, he said.The company’s struggles with its move to advanced 10-nanometer production are beginning to ease, Swan said. Intel plans to have server chips built with that technique available in the second half.Demand for personal computers held up well in the recent period, Davis said. Global PC shipments rose 2.3% from a year earlier in the December period as companies upgraded to a new version of Microsoft Corp.’s Windows operating system, according to research firm Gartner Inc. Intel expects the market this year for PCs to be flat from 2019 as that replacement cycle comes to an end.Intel has more than 80% market share in PC processors, and it controls even more of the server-chip market. In that business, semiconductor rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc. has fielded new products, and companies such as Amazon have said they’re designing some chips on their own -- leading some analysts to predict Intel would begin to lose business and struggle to grow this year. Intel executives said that part of the reason they’re predicting less growth for the second half is the expectation that competition will intensify.So far, there’s no sign of that hurting the company’s performance. In the fourth quarter, Intel’s data center unit reported a sales increase of 19% to $7.2 billion. PC-chip sales gained 2% to $10 billion. The company’s programmable-chip unit was the only division to post a decline. Sales at the Mobileye unit, which makes chips used to help vehicles pilot themselves, grew 31% to $240 million.(Updates with comment from CEO in 10th paragraph.)To contact the reporter on this story: Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.netTo contact the editor responsible for this story: Jillian Ward at jward56@bloomberg.netFor more articles like this, please visit us at bloomberg.comSubscribe now to stay ahead with the most trusted business news source.©2020 Bloomberg L.P.
- Zacks
Best Thematic ETF for 2020: Cloud, Internet of Things & More
Find out more about cloud computing, Internet of Things, video games and infrastructure ETFs.
- Zacks
What Investors Can Expect from Microsoft's Q2 Earnings & Beyond
Microsoft shares have surged 55% in the last year. Here's what investors can expect from the tech giant's Q2 fiscal 2020 earnings results and beyond...
- Zacks
Tech Daily: AAPL Bug, AMZN JEDI Motion, Music Subs, UK Digital Tax, More
The top stories here are Apple's ITP vulnerability, Amazon's motion to stop work under the JEDI contract, Amazon's soaring music subs and the UK digital tax.
- Zacks
Earnings from Comcast, Airlines & More, Plus a Cheap Tech Stock to Buy - Free Lunch
Quarterly earnings results from Comcast, Southwest, American Airlines, and more. And a look at why Pure Storage, Inc. (PSTG) is a Zacks Rank 1 (Strong Buy) stock right now, as it trades under $20 a share...
