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The Street

Business

Charley Blaine

Top stocks that could rock markets this week

Palo Alto Networks MAR Coinbase Crypto Cisco Systems CocaCola KO MCD McDonalds Nvidia

As 2024 gave birth to 2025, there was talk on Wall Street and money professionals about how the new year would be the dawn of a new era of intelligent, aggressive, very prosperous investing.

A new administration and a new Congress were arriving. Interest rates would fall. Regulation would be relaxed, and the animal spirits would be released to expand companies. To buy and sell companies. To see investment valuations explode.

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Maybe it will happen, but the past two weeks have suggested the road ahead will be more than a little bumpy.

Deportations of undocumented workers began soon after President Donald Trump was sworn into office. There were attempts to force massive cuts to federal payrolls. And Trump talked about seizing the Panama Canal, of buying Greenland from Denmark, and suggesting Canada should become the 51st state.

And there was talk of tariffs, of retaliatory tariffs, of punitive tariffs. The result of all this talk: Stocks tumbled on Friday and ended lower for the first full week of February. And all that noise sets up the week ahead for more market volatility than anyone expected.

More than 600 stocks are set to report earnings this week. Among them are three components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average—McDonalds (MCD) , Coca-Cola (KO) , and Cisco Systems (CSCO) — and several increasingly important technology companies.

If the outlooks offered by companies in the past few weeks are a guide, tariffs will affect the results of companies that have overseas operations or rely on imported inputs to make their products.

According to FactSet, companies have generally declined to provide numbers on how tariff decisions will affect their earnings. The reason is that the actual tariffs are not yet known.

In the meantime, here's a look at four stocks that might move markets more than we expect.

AppLovin sky-high earnings to continue

Earnings: Due after Wednesday's close. Market capitalization: $127.9 billion. Stock price: $375.72, down 4.9% on Friday. Up 16% year to date. 2024 change: 713%. Earnings estimate: 11 cents a share, up 37.5% from a year ago. Revenue estimate: $776.8 million, up about 28% from a year ago.

AppLovin (APP) builds software that developers use to move their applications into mobile devices and similar technologies. Revenue is growing quickly as cellphones take over the functions of PCs. Nineteen of 24 analysts rate the stock a buy or strong buy

More Tech Stocks:

Robinhood Markets: Crypto business is a key driver

Earnings: Due after Wednesday's close. Market capitalization: $47 billion. Stock price: $55.86, up 5.1% on Friday. Up 49.9% year to date. 2024 change: 192.5%. Earnings estimate: 52 cents a share, up 300% from a year ago. Revenue estimate: $951.8 million, up about 102% from a year ago.

Robinhood Markets (HOOD) introduced commission-free stock trading and now enables customers to trade stocks, exchange-traded funds, options, cryptocurrencies, and futures on metals, energy, stock indexes, currencies and crypto. Options seem to be the most popular category.

But nearly half the company's revenue comes from interest it gets from credit cards, lending money to other institutions and the like.

The risk is what happens if there is a crash more violent than the 2022-23 bear market.

Palo Alto Networks: an important player in cybersecurity

Earnings: Due after Thursday's close. Market capitalization: $127.26 billion. Stock price: $193.94, up 5.2% on Friday. Up 6.6% year-to-date. 2024 change: 23.4%. Earnings estimate: 78 cents a share, up 6.9% from a year ago. Revenue estimate: $2.24 billion, up about 13.1% from a year ago.

Palo Alto Networks (PANW) is a major player in cybersecurity along with CrowdStrike (CRWD) . Its biggest market is the corporate market and can offer everything security for the main computer systems and for, say, a company's laptops.

The company has 70,000 customers globally, and it benefits because much of its revenue is recurring.

Its Unit 42 is famed for hunting malicious software. It recently identified weaknesses in the DeepSeek artificial intelligence software from China.

The shares have risen at a compounded annual 38% rate since the end of 2019.

Palo Alto Networks' logo is displayed on a smartphone screen

SOPA Images/Getty Images

Coinbase: Ground zero of crypto

Earnings: Due after Thursday's close. Market capitalization: $67.7 billion. Stock price: $274.49, down 5.8%, on Friday. Up 10.6% year-to-date. 2024 change: 42.8%. Earnings estimate: $1.71 a share, up 64.4% from a year ago. Revenue estimate: $1.72 billion, up 80.3% from a year ago.

Coinbase operates a cryptocurrency exchange platform that operates worldwide. Some $185 billion is traded quarterly on its exchanges. The company pulled in $1.2 billion of revenue in the third quarter, up 79% from a year earlier, and reported net income of $75.5 million for the period, reversing a loss of $2.3 million a year before.

Coinbase enables crypto users trade futures contracts, and there are exchange-traded funds tied to bitcoin.

Domestic interest in crypto is significant, although hard numbers are difficult to come by. Its main use seems to be as speculation since it's subject to wide value swings. Cryptocurrencies were a profitable speculation in 2024, if only because the supply is slowly growing and will stop growing.

Coinbase is able to capitalize on that interest.

A sizable week of earnings

While this week doesn't have any of the Magnificent 7 reporting, the list of companies is still large. Here are some of the bigger reports due this week.

Monday