Alibaba (BABA) shares soared 6.2% in the last trading session to close at $102.74. The move was backed by solid volume with far more shares changing hands than in a normal session. This compares to the stock's 14.1% gain over the past four weeks.
The rise in Alibaba's stock comes after the tech giant shared details about Qwen2.5-Max, a large-scale Mixture-of-Expert (MoE) model. The model has been pretrained on over 20 trillion tokens and further enhanced with Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback methodologies. In a competitive field, Qwen2.5-Max outperformed DeepSeek V3 in several benchmarks, including Arena-Hard and LiveCodeBench, while showing competitive results in others like MMLU-Pro.
Alibaba's announcement also highlighted the model's availability for direct interaction through Qwen Chat and the provision of API access via Alibaba Cloud, suggesting a strategic move to enhance its cloud services' offerings. This development is likely to bolster Alibaba's position in the rapidly growing AI sector and provide additional value to its cloud computing business.
This online retailer is expected to post quarterly earnings of $3.08 per share in its upcoming report, which represents a year-over-year change of +15.4%. Revenues are expected to be $38.19 billion, up 4.1% from the year-ago quarter.
Earnings and revenue growth expectations certainly give a good sense of the potential strength in a stock, but empirical research shows that trends in earnings estimate revisions are strongly correlated with near-term stock price movements.
For Alibaba, the consensus EPS estimate for the quarter has been revised 36.8% lower over the last 30 days to the current level. And a negative trend in earnings estimate revisions doesn't usually translate into price appreciation. So, make sure to keep an eye on BABA going forward to see if this recent jump can turn into more strength down the road.
The stock currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today's Zacks Rank #1 (Strong Buy) stocks here >>>>
Alibaba is part of the Zacks Internet - Commerce industry. Booking Holdings (BKNG), another stock in the same industry, closed the last trading session 1.1% higher at $4,774.33. BKNG has returned -5% in the past month.
For Booking Holdings
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