Google-parent Alphabet announced its first-ever dividend and a $70 billion stock buyback, sending its stock surging nearly 16% after the bell. Microsoft beat estimates for its quarterly revenue and profit, driven by gains from adoption of artificial intelligence across its cloud services, and its shares jumped more than 4% in extended trade.
Snap was another outsize move, with its shares soaring nearly 30% in Frankfurt after the owner of the photo messaging app beat expectations for quarterly revenue and user growth.
It wasn’t all sweetness and light, however, and chipmaker Intel’s shares dived more than 8% after it forecast second-quarter revenue and profit below market estimates and was seen to be trailing in the booming market for AI components.
Nevertheless, the upshot for the wider market has seen Nasdaq futures jump back more than 1% overnight and S&P500 futures were up about 0.8% – with Friday’s earnings diary topped by Big Oil names such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron.
Asian and European bourses also rallied on Friday and the VIX stock market volatility gauge remained in check near Thursday’s lowest point in about two weeks.
But much of the macro market focus in Asia today has been on the plummeting and increasingly volatile Japanese yen – which skidded more than 0.5% to another 34-year low at 156.82 per dollar as the Bank of Japan stood pat on its still-easy monetary policy.
It swung wildly in London trading hours as traders grew wary of official action to stem its slide, although no actual intervention was detected yet and it retained much of the day’s losses.
The Bank of Japan kept interest rates around zero and highlighted a growing conviction that inflation was on track to durably hit 2% in coming years, signalling its readiness to hike borrowing costs later this year.
But the yen dropped amid a lack of clear guidance on the future rate hike path and the still yawning rate gap between Japan and the rest of the developed world.
