Microsoft added nearly $500 billion in market value ($480 billion, to be exact) in a single trading session on Thursday—a more than 17% surge—after reporting fiscal fourth-quarter results that showed Azure revenue surpassing $100 billion for the first time, with Microsoft Cloud revenue up 27% year-over-year to $59.3 billion.
But blowout results, even those released within hours of Microsoft’s, haven’t been greeted with similar euphoria. Take Samsung, which posted a record $62 billion profit, a 19-fold increase, and then saw stocks sell off, or Meta, punished after another quarter of growing revenue. The Dow fell more than 1,100 points on Wednesday, before Microsoft reported its blowout quarter after the close.
Three market watchers looked at the same week and came away with three different explanations for why.
The leverage argument
Steve Sosnick, chief strategist at Interactive Brokers, had told Axios earlier in the week that the market narrative had flipped from “all news being good news for AI” to something like “let’s look under some rocks and see what the risks are.” After Microsoft’s earnings, he laughed as he told Fortune the story had changed “just a tad.” But he didn’t think the fundamental question was resolved. “We are in a ‘rip up the script every day’ kind of mode,” he said.
