9:05am (EST)
The bulls extended the major indexes winning streak to six following Thursday’s gains. However, judging by this morning’s futures, the bulls will have to dig out of a hole to make it seven in-a-row.
The Dow managed to squeeze a 22 point win and closed at 11,144 after touching a low of 11,096 on Thursday. The index peaked at 11,154 and touched another new 52-week high in the process.
The S&P 500 added a point to finish at 1,211 while the Nasdaq added 11 and settled at 2,515.
The big news after the close last night was Google’s (GOOG, $595.30, up $6.30) numbers. Although impressive, shares got hammered, losing 29 points, and were last seen at $566 in pre-market trading.
The company earned nearly $2 billion, or $6.06 per share, in the quarter, versus $1.4 billion, or $4.49 per share, in the year-ago period. Goog’s would have earned $6.76 a share but took a hit for expenses covering employee stock compensation. Wall Street was expecting $6.60 a share on average.
Revenue surged over 20% to $6.8 billion which marked Google’s greatest revenue growth since 3Q08. After subtracting commissions paid to advertising partners, Google’s revenue really came in at a little over $5 billion but was still about $90 million above estimates.
We said yesterday that Google was the wild card and we also said we could get a “curveball”. Well, we did. The real deal with Google’s big drop was the fact the company’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, was NOT on the conference call. To compare it to the sports world, it would be like a NFL owner not going to the Super Bowl when the team he owns is in it.
To put things in perspective, the 30 point drop in the stock is only a 5% fall and the rumors on why their CEO did not do the yapping on the earnings call are running rampant. Look, the rumors are overblown. Yes, Google didn’t do a very good job of giving Wall Street a heads-up but this morning’s sell-off will be met with buying.
Bank of America (BAC, $19.48, up $0.08) and General Electric (GE, $19.50, up $0.15) reported this morning before the opening bell and that has helped futures come up off of their lows after they beat estimates.
Both stocks are flat as we head towards the open with BAC up a few pennies while GE is down a penny.
As we head to press, Dow futures are lower by 23, Nasdaq 100 futures are off by 6 while the S&P 500 futures are down 4.
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