The stock market looks upside down right now. On one hand, shares of AI juggernaut Nvidia are down more than 3%, while dog of the Dow industrials Salesforce popped 5% after quarterly results. The former has been the market stalwart of 2024, up more than 153%. The latter, meanwhile, is down 1% for the year. Blame some concern over Nvidia’s gross margins despite what was otherwise a blockbuster report. Some on the Street also argued that Nvidia missed the so-called whisper number for revenue. Meanwhile, Salesforce raised its full year outlook. CRM NVDA 1D mountain CRM vs NVDA That said, traders weren’t reading too much into these one-day moves. Volume has been overly light in recent sessions, suggesting little-to-no conviction on many of trades seen recently. U.S. composite volume, which encompasses all stock trades across exchanges, came in at 8.7 billion shares on Tuesday. That’s the lowest since July 3. Expect that to get only worse the next two days heading Labor Day weekend, meaning one should take any price action with a grain of salt. As JPMorgan head of U.S. market intelligence Andrew Tyler put it in his Thursday note, “volumes continued to dwindle as we approach the start of pumpkin spice season.” On top of that, analysts on the Street dissecting the results think the long-term stories for both companies remain intact. “We are buyers of NVDA on the pullback following the Q2 print,” wrote Piper Sandler’s Harsh Kumar. “In our opinion, fundamentals remain intact.” Bank of America’s Vivek Arya told investors to ” ignore the quarterly noise ,” adding that Nvidia offers “unique growth at very reasonable valuation.” Meanwhile, Bernstein analyst Mark Moerdler maintained an underperform rating on Salesforce. “The longer term revenue growth question remains unanswered one way or the other. While management is focusing the street on new growth drivers (Data Cloud and now Agent Force), there are lots of questions as to the sustainability or potential revenue generation of these two growth areas given competition and the numerous unknowns around the [return on investment] and value of Generative AI capabilities as well as margin impact,” Moerdler wrote.
