London pre-open: Stocks to fall despite solid Nvidia results

(Sharecast News) - London stocks were set to fall at the open on Thursday despite strong quarterly earnings from US chip maker Nvidia.

The FTSE 100 was called to open around 44 points lower.

Ipek Ozkardeskaya, senior analyst at Swissquote, said: "We wake up to one of these days: Nvidia's earnings can't be ignored. No matter how high the expectations were, no matter how much higher the whisper numbers sat, Nvidia managed to beat ALL of these expectations. The company printed revenue of $96bn - beating the highest bar of Wall Street expectations. Profit more than doubled to $54bn in Q2 this year compared to a year ago. And more importantly, Nvidia said that it expects to earn $108bn (+/-2%) in the current quarter. That came in around $4bn higher than what analysts had pencilled in and would also be the first time the company breaches the $100bn bar.

"Funny enough, though, these numbers alone couldn't give Nvidia shares a boost in after-hours trading. What made the difference was the company's CFO telling investors that the company's revenue would grow 70% in fiscal year 2028 - and, wait - the latter would be 100% if they weren't facing supply constraints!

"The latter sent Nvidia's shares up by more than 4.50%, confirming that despite concerns that the AI buildout could slow - whether because Big Tech companies are overinvesting to avoid falling behind in the AI race, because financing additional spending will become costlier due to the fact that they have already spent everything they had on hand to shoulder the spending of the past three years, or because they successfully build alternatives to replace Nvidia's - the AI buildout will continue at full speed, and Nvidia will continue to put a notable part of this spending in its pockets."

In UK corporate news, Prudential raised its share buyback programme after reporting strong first-half results, which showed adjusted operating pre-tax profit at the insurance and asset management company were up 10% at $1.52bn.

The firm added $300m to its planned share repurchases, taking its total buyback plan for the year to $1.5bn. The interim dividend was also increased by 15%.

Elsewhere, drugmaker AstraZeneca said that Tezspire had delivered positive Phase III results in eosinophilic oesophagitis, hitting both coprimary endpoints and all key secondary measures, with improvements sustained through 52 weeks.

The CROSSING study showed Tezspire produced "statistically significant and clinically meaningful" gains in histologic remission and in the frequency and severity of dysphagia. AstraZeneca added that the safety profile was broadly in line with existing indications.