Thursday, April 16th, 2026
Another up-day in today’s stock market saw Nasdaq reach its 12th straight positive session, the longest since 2009, which was upon the bounceback from the Great Recession. Both it and the S&P 500 notched fresh record closing highs, apparently on sentiment that the cease-fire in Iran will lead to a near-term peace agreement.
The Dow gained +115 points today, +0.24%, and the S&P 500 was up a similar +18 points, +0.26%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq outperformed the major indexes again today, +86 points or +0.36%, while the small-cap Russell 2000 grew by 5 points, +0.22%. The Dow is up +6% off late-March lows, while the other indexes are +10% or higher.
Netflix Disappoints in Q1 & Guidance
Streaming giant Netflix NFLX reported Q1 results after today’s close, and a careful reading of these results see a pretty significant miss on its bottom line: Originally reported as earnings of $1.23 per share, a $2.8 billion one-time termination fee paid to the company when its Warner Brothers Discovery WBD bid fell through takes this figure down to a mere $0.70 per share, much lower than the $0.81 in the Zacks consensus, and only 4 cents higher than the year-ago tally.
Revenues did eke out a beat from expectations — $12.25 billion from $12.17 billion anticipated, for a +16% year over year gain — but Netflix did not raise guidance for Q2. As a result, the company expects lower top and bottom-line results than the Zacks consensus estimates had been. We expect this will deliver a hit to Netflix’s current Zacks Rank #2 (Buy) rating.
As a result, late trading is taking a big bite out of the stock’s +15% year-to-date gains: -8.5% at this hour. Also, co-founder and Executive Chairman Reed Hastings announced he will be stepping down from his seat on the Netflix board this June.
What to Expect from the Stock Market Tomorrow
We skip the economic reports for Friday of this week, after a fairly eventful past few days with PPI wholesale inflation, Existing Home Sales and Homebuilder Confidence, Import/Export Prices and Empire State/Philly Fed results. What we will see, however, are some other financial companies posting quarterly numbers, among them State Street STT and Fifth Third Bank FITB.
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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).