Shares in the chip designer Nvidia have fallen after investors were spooked by signs of slowing growth and production issues, despite the artificial intelligence company posting a 122% rise in second-quarter revenues compared with the same period last year. The Silicon Valley company's revenues for the period more than doubled to 30bn ( 23bn), beating average analyst estimates of 28.7bn. However, investors were concerned about signs of a slowdown in growth, in particular around its next-generation AI chips, code-named Blackwell. The stock fell as much as 7% in pre-market trading, before paring back losses to a 3% fall. The chipmaker is the third most valuable company in the world, with a market value of 3.1tn.

Chipmaker Nvidia reported its latest financial results on Wednesday, recording 30.04bn in revenue over the past three months – a 122% jump from the year prior – and showing that artificial intelligence investment mania shows no signs of cooling. Analysts had anticipated about 28.7bn in revenue. Shares slid more than 3% in after-hours trading. "The company continues to benefit from a market paradox: big tech's aggressive AI investment strategies drive massive demand for Nvidia's chips, even as these same companies invest in developing their own silicon," said Jacob Bourne, a technology analyst with Emarketer. Nvidia has told customers that its next-generation AI chips, code-named Blackwell, will be delayed several months from January, though early samples are shipping to a small group of customers now.

Large language models (LLMs) have advanced financial applications, yet they often lack sufficient financial knowledge and struggle with tasks involving multi-modal inputs like tables and time series data. To address these limitations, we introduce \textit{Open-FinLLMs}, a series of Financial LLMs. We begin with FinLLaMA, pre-trained on a 52 billion token financial corpus, incorporating text, tables, and time-series data to embed comprehensive financial knowledge. FinLLaMA is then instruction fine-tuned with 573K financial instructions, resulting in FinLLaMA-instruct, which enhances task performance. Finally, we present FinLLaVA, a multimodal LLM trained with 1.43M image-text instructions to handle complex financial data types. Extensive evaluations demonstrate FinLLaMA's superior performance over LLaMA3-8B, LLaMA3.1-8B, and BloombergGPT in both zero-shot and few-shot settings across 19 and 4 datasets, respectively. FinLLaMA-instruct outperforms GPT-4 and other Financial LLMs on 15 datasets. FinLLaVA excels in understanding tables and charts across 4 multimodal tasks. Additionally, FinLLaMA achieves impressive Sharpe Ratios in trading simulations, highlighting its robust financial application capabilities. We will continually maintain and improve our models and benchmarks to support ongoing innovation in academia and industry.

Accurate stock market predictions following earnings reports are crucial for investors. Traditional methods, particularly classical machine learning models, struggle with these predictions because they cannot effectively process and interpret extensive textual data contained in earnings reports and often overlook nuances that influence market movements. This paper introduces an advanced approach by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) instruction fine-tuned with a novel combination of instruction-based techniques and quantized low-rank adaptation (QLoRA) compression. Our methodology integrates 'base factors', such as financial metric growth and earnings transcripts, with 'external factors', including recent market indices performances and analyst grades, to create a rich, supervised dataset. This comprehensive dataset enables our models to achieve superior predictive performance in terms of accuracy, weighted F1, and Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC), especially evident in the comparison with benchmarks such as GPT-4. We specifically highlight the efficacy of the llama-3-8b-Instruct-4bit model, which showcases significant improvements over baseline models. The paper also discusses the potential of expanding the output capabilities to include a 'Hold' option and extending the prediction horizon, aiming to accommodate various investment styles and time frames. This study not only demonstrates the power of integrating cutting-edge AI with fine-tuned financial data but also paves the way for future research in enhancing AI-driven financial analysis tools.

Apple reported better-than-expected earnings in the third quarter of 2024, with buzz about its new AI features offsetting a continuing decline in its key China market. Earnings exceeded analyst predictions despite a year-over-year decline in iPhone sales, with revenue rising 4.9% to 85.78bn in the three months ending 29 June, beating the average analyst estimate of 84.53bn. The company maintained its cash dividend at 25 cents for each share. The strong report represented a bright spot in the tech space after difficult earnings reports from other tech giants like Amazon, Snap and Intel. The market saw a sell-off on Thursday amid disappointing results, including from Intel – which announced plans to cut more than 15,000 jobs as it tries to cut billions of dollars in costs to turn its business around.

Meta's shares rose in after-hours trading on Wednesday off the back of a strong earnings report that comes as the company is spending heavily on AI tools. The company's stock price grew around 5% following the report, which revealed the company outperformed analysts' expectations for its second quarter. Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, reported 39.07bn in revenue and 5.16 earnings per share. Both results outpaced market predictions of around 38bn in revenue and 4.7 per share, while the company also reported 8.47bn in capital expenditures – lower than analysts expected. "We had a strong quarter, and Meta AI is on track to be the most used AI assistant in the world by the end of the year," Mark Zuckerberg, Meta's CEO, claimed in a statement.

Microsoft outperformed analyst predictions in its latest quarterly earnings report, revealing on Tuesday that its revenue was up 15% year-over-year. But growth of the company's closely watched Azure cloud computing services failed to meet expectations and shares in Microsoft fell as much as 7% in after-hours trading. The company was expected to report steady growth in its fourth quarter earnings report, mostly on the back of its cloud services. Revenue from those services grew 29%, lower than the 30% to 31% that analysts predicted, resulting in a sell-off that exacerbates big tech's recent market woes. In Microsoft's earnings report, Satya Nadella, the CEO, sought to bolster confidence in the company's performance. "Our strong performance this fiscal year speaks both to our innovation and to the trust customers continue to place in Microsoft," said Nadella in the earnings statement.

Shares in technology companies, especially those related to AI, have driven much of this year's stock market gains. AI chip giant Nvidia, which has been one of the main beneficiaries of the AI boom, saw its shares drop 6.8%. It has lost about 15% of its value in the last two weeks. The company is set to report financial results at the end of August. Shares in multi-billionaire Elon Musk's electric car maker Tesla dropped by more than 12% after its latest financial results disappointed investors.

Google's parent company, Alphabet, outperformed analysts' expectations on Tuesday, reporting second-quarter earnings of 1.89 per share, the same as its first quarter results. Alphabet's CEO, Sundar Pichai, touted the results as proof that the company's investments across different areas of its tech empire were seeing positive returns. "Our strong performance this quarter highlights ongoing strength in Search and momentum in Cloud. We are innovating at every layer of the AI stack," Pichai stated in the earnings report. "Our longstanding infrastructure leadership and in-house research teams position us well as technology evolves and as we pursue the many opportunities ahead."

Samsung Electronics expects its profits for the three months to June 2024 to jump 15-fold compared to the same period last year. An artificial intelligence (AI) boom has lifted the prices of advanced chips, driving up the firm's forecast for the second quarter. The South Korean tech giant is the world's largest maker of memory chips, smartphones and televisions. The announcement pushed Samsung shares up more than 2% during early trading hours in Seoul. The firm also reported a more than 10-fold jump in its profits for the first three months of this year.