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Meta Platforms (META) shares rose Thursday after analysts lifted their price targets for the stock, citing positive signals surrounding the tech giant's artificial intelligence (AI) opportunity.

Analysts said the company's better-than-expected second-quarter results released Wednesday and the early AI gains, eased concerns about Meta's increased spending to invest in the technology.

Meta shares were up 4.5% at $496.05 in recent trading, contributing to the stock's nearly 40% year-to-date gain.

UBS analysts said "the most important development" from Meta's earnings call was that it eased lingering uncertainty about the stock after AI spending worried investors after the company's previous quarterly report.

The analysts said that the company's third-quarter outlook indicates that Meta expects a strong second half of the year. They also said that CEO Mark Zuckerberg's remarks gave investors more clarity on the company's expectations for AI spending and monetization.

UBS on Thursday lifted its Meta price target to $635 from $630.

Meta told investors that its AI tech is improving its recommendation engines, offering early indicators that its significant capital expenditures (CapEx) in that direction are benefiting the company.

The company lifted the lower end of its outlook for full-year spending to $37 billion from $35 billion and said increased CapEx is expected in the next year.

Bank of America Securities analysts said that Meta's "solid quarter and outlook suggest durable AI advantages."

BofA, which calls Meta the "top AI play in consumer Internet," raised its price target on the stock to $563 from $550.

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Media personality Toke, has said, she hope you get to achieve half of what she has achieved.

She said this after she was called childl£ss due to two failed IVF by she added that her childlessness will not change anybody’s situation.

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Stocks enter August halfway through second-quarter earnings season and amid a notable break with the dominant market trends of the last year and a half.

Tech stocks, led by the Magnificent Seven, carried the S&P 500 to record highs in early July before a tame inflation report changed everything. The Mag Seven slipped into a correction later in the month as investors sold off tech stocks on fears of slowing growth, overbought conditions, and unsustainable spending on artificial intelligence.

Meanwhile, the small-cap Russell 2000 soared as investors bet on the companies that could benefit most from interest rate cuts, the first of which the Federal Reserve is widely expected to make in September.

Below, we look at five companies with events coming up in August that could be catalysts for big stock moves.

Nvidia (NVDA) will report earnings late in the month, and the results are likely to have implications for the broader market.

Nvidia has more than a year of the AI boom under its belt, meaning the chipmaker’s year-over-year comparisons are set to become more challenging. Top and bottom line growth are both expected to have declined in the most recent quarter to their slowest pace since early 2023, according to consensus analyst estimates compiled by Visible Alpha. Even so, revenue and profit are each forecast to have more than doubled from last year. 

Nvidia’s stock, like its Magnificent Seven peers, has lost some of its lustre in recent weeks amid a rotation out of big tech stocks into small caps. That rotation was spurred by a soft inflation report that boosted conviction the Fed will lower interest rates soon and, in turn, take pressure off smaller companies with floating-rate debt.

The tech sell-off picked up steam last week when an earnings report from Alphabet (GOOGL) raised concerns that cloud providers could be overspending on artificial intelligence. Results from Meta (META) and Microsoft (MSFT) allayed some of those fears this week, but another blowout earnings report from Nvidia could revive the narrative, putting more pressure on big tech stocks. On the other hand, it could breathe fresh life into the AI trade.

Walmart's (WMT) earnings will provide insights into the health of consumer finances. 

Americans, weighed on by inflation and elevated interest rates, are prioritizing value, a development that has forced retailers to slash prices en masse and fast-food chains to launch value menus in bids to retain customers. 

Walmart has been a rare beneficiary of this shift in consumer behavior. The retailer in May topped first-quarter sales and earnings estimates. The company’s revenue has been boosted in recent quarters by increased traffic from high-income shoppers feeling the pinch of higher prices. Persistent inflation and economic uncertainty have also driven Americans to dine out less in recent quarters, buoying Walmart’s massive grocery business.

Wall Street expects Walmart’s revenue growth slowed in the second quarter but remained above its pre-pandemic average. Earnings are also forecast to come in on the higher end of earlier guidance.

The second quarter is consistently Home Depot’s (HD) biggest, but the world’s largest home improvement retailer approaches its upcoming earnings report in a precarious position.

Revenue and profit have declined year-over-year in each of the last five quarters, and Wall Street expects that to be true of this past quarter as well. Years of elevated inflation have crimped consumers’ discretionary spending, putting pressure on sales of appliances and other big-ticket items. At the same time, elevated interest rates have chilled the U.S. housing market, leading homeowners to defer renovations and upgrades. 

Realtors and industry professionals had hoped this year’s spring homebuying season would reawaken the U.S. housing market, but that has not materialized. Existing home sales declined for a fourth consecutive month in June while new home sales slumped to their lowest level since November. 

But there’s hope on the horizon. Mortgage rates have declined in recent weeks, nudged lower by Wall Street’s increasing confidence that the Federal Reserve will begin cutting interest rates in September. Plus, housing inventory reached its highest level since 2008 in June, giving homebuyers plenty of options when they do return to the market. 

Investors and analysts will likely be focusing on Home Depot’s guidance for evidence that management, like Wall Street, sees the potential for home renovation and selling activity to pick up in the second half of the year.

CrowdStrike (CRWD) enters the month of August focused on damage control. 

The cybersecurity company sparked a global tech outage on July 19 when it rolled out a software update for Windows. The ensuing chaos, which disrupted airlines, banks, and health care, is expected to cost the Fortune 500 more than $5 billion. Delta Airlines (DAL), which estimates its losses from the fiasco total $500 million, is also reportedly preparing to sue the company and Windows maker Microsoft for outage-related damages.

CrowdStrike shares plunged more than 11% on the day of the outage and have continued to slide since then.

CrowdStrike is expected to report second-quarter earnings late in the month, and Wall Street is forecasting double-digit revenue and earnings growth. However, last quarter’s results could take a back seat on CrowdStrike’s earnings call as analysts focus on the outage and its impact on future earnings.

Paramount’s (PARA) controlling shareholder National Amusements in July finally agreed to a merger with David Ellison’s Skydance Media after months of negotiation. 

The $8 billion deal, announced on July 8, includes a 45-day “go shop” period during which Paramount can solicit competing offers. The storied Hollywood studio received several competing offers during its back-and-forth with Skydance. Media mogul Byron Allen in January offered to buy the company’s outstanding shares for more than $14 billion. And in March private equity firm Apollo Management offered $11 billion to acquire the company’s film and television studio. 

It’s possible Paramount’s directors and controlling shareholder Shari Redstone just want this process to be over after more than half a year of acquisition talks. But the saga has been full of twists and turns—including when Redstone in June unexpectedly called off what was thought to be a done deal with Skydance—and another surprise could come in August.

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Meta (META) shares jumped on Thursday as the company's second-quarter results eased some of Wall Street’s fears about overspending on artificial intelligence. 

Meta on Wednesday reported capital expenditures (CapEx) increased 33% in the second quarter to $8.17 billion. It also raised the low end of its 2024 CapEx forecast to $37 billion from $35 billion. It left the upper band of its forecast range at $40 billion. 

The company joins a chorus of big tech companies saying they’ve dramatically increased their spending on AI infrastructure and expect to invest even more next year. Alphabet (GOOGL) and Microsoft (MSFT) increased CapEx by 91% and 55%, respectively, in the second quarter. 

But the market reacted very differently to each company’s CapEx outlook, a reflection of how quickly the narrative surrounding AI can change on Wall Street. 

Alphabet stock slumped last week as investors digested its surging AI spending and YouTube advertising revenue that fell slightly short of expectations. “The risk of underinvesting is dramatically greater than the risk of overinvesting for us here," said CEO Sundar Pichai of the company’s CapEx on a call with analysts. Still, the results amplified Wall Street’s worries about big tech’s spending spree and helped spark the sector’s most painful sell-off in more than a year. 

Microsoft shares initially plummeted when its cloud unit slightly missed estimates—revenue grew 29% rather than the 30% Wall Street expected—and full-year CapEx came in at $69 billion, up 60% from the prior year.

But the stock recovered most of its losses to close down just 1% on Wednesday after CFO Amy Hood made a compelling case for all that spending. Cloud revenue was hamstrung, she said, by a combination of economic softness in Europe and “capacity constraints,” or Microsoft’s inability to meet AI demand with its existing infrastructure.

That was welcome news on Wall Street. “I think they kind of put to rest a lot of the concerns out there,” said CFRA analyst Angelo Zino of Microsoft’s forecast that investments would help it reaccelerate cloud growth in the first half of the next calendar year.

Markets may also be shrugging off Meta’s CapEx spending because of the relative clarity of its AI strategy, Zino says. 

CEO Mark Zuckerberg opened Meta’s earnings call by explaining how AI currently fits into the company’s core ad business and what he thinks lies ahead. That included AI Studio, with which users can create their own AIs to integrate with Meta’s platforms, and Business AIs that could eventually act as customer service reps or salespeople.  

“We have an exciting roadmap ahead of things that we want to add, but the bottom line here is that Meta AI feels like it is on track to be an important service and it's improving quickly both in intelligence and features,” Zuckerberg said, according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense.

“Zuckerberg gave a pretty good story in terms of the growth opportunities tied to AI,” Zino says. 

Meta also has what Zino described as an “easier” AI story than some of its hyperscaler peers. “Alphabet is a lot messier of a story these days because of the uncertainty about the search business,” Zino said. 

And much of the simplicity of that story stems from Meta being able to point to concrete benefits of its AI investments. AI, the company says, has increased engagement across its family of apps by improving content recommendations. That helped the company increase revenue by 20% in the second quarter, driven in equal measure by higher ad impressions and higher ad prices.

“You’re seeing it in terms of growth numbers. This company is growing well above the pace of the broader digital ad market and essentially all of its competitors,” says Zino.

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A 37-year-old Baddie has revealed why she joined the #EndBadGovernance protest.

She said, it’s because of bad governance that she is has not gotten a husband at 37 years of age.

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The active ingredient in Eli Lilly's (LLY) flagship weight-loss drug has a new potential indication: heart failure treatment.

Tirzepatide, sold as Mounjaro to treat Type 2 diabetes and Zepbound for obesity, reduced the risk of heart failure outcomes by 38% versus placebo in a Phase 3 clinical trial, the company said Thursday. 

The SUMMIT trial evaluated the safety and efficacy of the drug in adults with heart failure with preserved ejection fraction (HFpEF) and obesity. In addition to improved heart failure outcomes, participants also saw an average of 15.7% reduction in body weight, compared with 2.2% for placebo. 

Eli Lilly said it plans to submit the results of the trial to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and other regulators later this year. 

Shares of the drugmaker rose nearly 3% to $826.98 as of noon ET Thursday. They are up more than 40% this year.

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