Chip giant Nvidia is set to release its latest earnings report – and the results could move the entire US stock market. Over the past two years, the chipmaker has risen to become the world's most valuable company, with a market capitalisation of more than 4 trillion. When Nvidia announces its earnings on Wednesday, investors will get to see how the tech giant has been faring amid the tumult of President Donald Trump's trade salvoes and concerns about whether artificial intelligence has been overhyped. Nvidia specialises in making the graphics processing units (GPUs) that power AI, including the Blackwell B200, marketed as the world's most powerful chip. The California-based company's chips have become essential to the world's largest tech companies, including Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet, since AI exploded into the mainstream with the release of OpenAI's generative AI chatbot, ChatGPT, in November 2022.

Three major Japanese convenience store operators posted growth in their group operating revenues and profits in the March-May first quarter of the current business year, according to their earnings reports. Retail giant Seven & I Holdings, the operator of industry leader Seven-Eleven Japan, saw its mainstay overseas convenience store operations recover thanks to labor and other cost cuts. FamilyMart's operating profit grew 17.9% from a year before to 27.8 billion, as advertisements featuring Los Angeles Dodgers star Shohei Ohtani helped attract more customers and boost sales of onigiri rice balls. FamilyMart also attracted budget-minded consumers thanks to its discount sales of food items such as eggs and milk. As a result, the company's net profit jumped 36.7% to a record 21.1 billion.

Analyzing stocks and making higher accurate predictions on where the price is heading continues to become more and more challenging therefore, we designed a new financial algorithm that leverages social media sentiment analysis to enhance the prediction of key stock earnings and associated volatility. Our model integrates sentiment analysis and data retrieval techniques to extract critical information from social media, analyze company financials, and compare sentiments between Wall Street and the general public. This approach aims to provide investors with timely data to execute trades based on key events, rather than relying on long-term stock holding strategies. The stock market is characterized by rapid data flow and fluctuating community sentiments, which can significantly impact trading outcomes. Stock forecasting is complex given its stochastic dynamic. Standard traditional prediction methods often overlook key events and media engagement, focusing its practice into long-term investment options. Our research seeks to change the stochastic dynamic to a more predictable environment by examining the impact of media on stock volatility, understanding and identifying sentiment differences between Wall Street and retail investors, and evaluating the impact of various media networks in predicting earning reports.

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.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, has reported a higher-than-expected profit of 13.5bn for the most recent quarter, sending its shares nearly 7 percent higher. Revenue in the April-June period came in at 39bn, above market expectations and up 22 percent compared with the previous year, Meta said in its latest earnings report on Wednesday. The California-based tech giant said that it expected revenue in the third quarter to come in at between 38.5bn and 41bn. "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," Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said. "We've released the first frontier-level open source AI model, we continue to see good traction with our Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses, and we're driving good growth across our apps."

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.

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."

Apple released its earnings report on Thursday, revealing a drop in overall revenue fueled by slackening iPhone sales. Earnings exceeded market expectations, however, and Apple's shares rose in after-hours trading. Tim Cook, Apple's chief executive, said in a statement released before the call that "Apple is reporting revenue of 90.8bn for the March quarter, including an all-time revenue record in services". The iPhone maker reported revenue of 90.8bn, down 4% year-over-year, but surpassing anticipated earnings of 90.1bn. It declared 0.25 in cash dividend for each share, an increase of 4%.

Tesla has shown off a preview of an upcoming ride-hailing feature in its app ahead of an August robotaxi unveiling. The company released mock-ups of the upcoming feature, which showed the ability to "summon" a ride from the Tesla app. The company didn't offer many details about how it would work, but images show Uber-like functionality, with the ability to remotely set the car's temperature ahead of its arrival. Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced earlier this month that the company would unveil its long-promised robotaxis August 8. Tesla has been promising a self-driving ride hailing service for years, with Musk promising the company's robotaxi would start picking up riders back in 2019.