Next week on the stock market

NVIDIA’s had a strong start to the year, with first-quarter numbers coming in ahead of market expectations. Revenue shot up 262% to $26bn, fuelled by accelerating demand for its artificial intelligence (AI) focussed computing platforms. Costs are being controlled well, meaning operating profits were up almost sevenfold to $16.9bn.

We’re expecting this momentum to continue into next week’s results. The likes of META, Amazon, and Microsoft are all customers, each with deep pockets and a desire to build out their AI offerings with the power of NVIDIA’s market-leading chips. That’s underpinning the market’s view that second-quarter revenue and operating profits can more than double to $28.6bn and $18.7bn respectively. That looks achievable in our eyes so our focus will be on the outlook, hoping to gain an idea of just how far ahead NVIDIA expects this rate of growth to continue.

Bunzl’s a classic ‘steady-eddy’ and June’s trading statement suggests that next week's first-half results shouldn’t throw up any surprises. There was a small upgrade to margin guidance, so we’re now looking for a slight improvement from last year. Acquisitions and an increasing contribution from the own-brand lines should prop up the top line, but organic growth is expected to drop by 5%.

The US business is feeling the effects of weaker volumes and a slower pace of price hikes. We’d like to see volume trends picking up over the second quarter and some positive commentary on the outlook for the rest of the year. The acquisition pipeline is also key, Bunzl relies on bolt-on business to tap into its fragmented end markets. £600mn has already been committed to new deals this year, compared to £468mn for the entire of 2023. Continued momentum here is a positive sign that Bunzl is seeing attractive areas to expand into.

Salesforce missed the mark back in May. It perhaps wasn’t as bad a quarter as the market reaction suggested, and the stock has recovered most of the losses since then. But when you miss expectations on current quarter performance and issue downbeat guidance, it rarely ends well.

We’re looking for 7-8% growth in second-quarter revenue and investors will be hoping to see no downgrades to full-year guidance of 8-9%. Businesses are still being selective with their software spend, it’s down to Salesforce to keep improving its bundling proposition and start to make headway with AI tools to push through the softer macro environment.