- Ahead of the company’s earnings report, millennial traders are buying lots of Microsoft shares.
- Investors will be looking for any hints on how patches for the Spectre and Meltdown CPU flaws are coming along.
- Watch the stock trade in real time here.
Millennials love Microsoft right now.
On the same day that Apple got a rare downgrade from Wall Street, young investors were buying up shares of its biggest rival en masse. On the Stockpile stock trading app, which lets users buy fractional shares of companies, young investors were buying Microsoft shares 5.8 times as often as they were selling them.
Microsoft is currently one of the most popular stocks in the Stockpile app, ranking as the 16th most popular.
Wall Street is also optimistic about Microsoft. 27 of the 36 analysts tracked by Bloomberg rate the company as a buy, with only two rating the company as a sell.
Analysts are expecting the company to report adjusted earnings of $0.86 per share on revenue of $28.39 billion during its earnings report after markets close Wednesday.
Microsoft, as well as other hardware and software makers, have been working to mitigate the effects of the recently disclosed Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities. Microsoft recently rolled back and blocked updates from Intel and AMD because the updates were causing instability in some users' machines.
The flaws are present at the CPU level of Microsoft's machines, and shouldn't affect future generations of chips, but Microsoft's growing cloud business could be particularly attractive to hackers looking to exploit the bug.
Microsoft is trading 1.51% higher on Wednesday and has risen 9.56% so far this year.
Read about AMD's earnings report here.
