Jack Dorsey gets a much-needed strong second quarter performance from Square

Jack Dorsey really needs a hit. After Twitter’s weak second-quarter showing, and both stocks not performing well in the past year, Dorsey — as the lead of both companies — needs to show investors his strategies are working (and that he can run both companies).

Well, he certainly got one today. Square reported its second-quarter earnings, where it brought in $439 million in revenue, whereas analysts were expecting revenue of $406 million. Square posted a loss of 8 cents per share, compared to analyst expectations of a loss of 11 cents per share. With a clear outperformance on two of the key metrics that the company is graded on, it looks like Dorsey may have bought himself some room to maneuver in Wall Street for Square.

Across the board, the metrics look good. Revenue was up 41% year-over-year, gross payment volume was up 42% year-over-year, and the company extended $189 million through Square Capital — up 123% from the same quarter a year ago.

Its Square Capital business is increasingly important for the company as it tries to lock businesses into its payments infrastructure. By helping businesses get off the ground with an easy-to-use interface and ramp-up process, it can ensure that those businesses hang around as they continue to scale up. It also represents another additional tranche of revenue it can rely on to grow beyond its traditional point of sale system — at least, until it can figure out other revenue streams and maybe see some strong growth from Square Cash.

Still, businesses like Square Capital might be tricky moving forward. We’ve seen for some time that institutional sources of capital are more skittish these days. That source of capital has provided companies like Lending Club with lots of resources to operate their loaning operations — and grow them quickly. But there could be some early signs of change that may signal a more difficult time to gather capital for online lending businesses. That might not necessarily apply to Square, but it does represent a potential hurdle.

Still, there was no specific mention or breakout of Square Cash in the earnings report. With Venmo becoming a huge business and competition coming from basically every direction — including Facebook — Square needs to figure out its own spin on peer-to-peer transactions

Square has had a rocky year, with its shares down around 20%. But in extended trading after reporting its second-quarter earnings, shares of Square were up as much as 10%. It was important to show that Square could continue to grow and prove it could come up with a sustainable model working on three fronts: point of sale, Square Capital, and the potential of its peer-to-peer payments system Square Cash.

And there’s still an elephant in the room: Dorsey. Currently running two companies — Twitter and Square — it’s not clear how long Wall Street’s patience will last with both stocks currently floundering. Shares of Twitter are down around 38% over the past year. Most recently, Twitter’s poor performance sent the stock diving 10% when it reported its second-quarter earnings report.

Amazon shatters earnings expectations

Amazon shattered expectations when it reported second quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday. Adjusted earnings per share came in at $1.78, when Wall Street was forecasting $1.11. Amazon also beat revenue predictions, posting $30.4 billion for the quarter when analysts were expecting $29.55 billion. Shares ticked up 2 percent in after-hours trading.

The company saw a significant increase in sales and profit from the same period last year. Net sales were up 31 percent and net income was $857 million, a large jump from last year’s $92 million. Amazon also spent many years unprofitable, while it invested in growth.

In a statement, CEO Jeff Bezos touted the early success of their Indian business. “The team in India is inventing at a torrid pace, and we’re very grateful to our Indian customers for their welcoming response.”

The company announced that it expects its revenue for the third quarter to be between $31 billion and $33.5 billion. Operating income had a wide range, forecasting somewhere between $50 and $650 million.

Amazon tends to make a lot of experimental bets. They’ve had early traction with their Alexa voice-activated personal assistant device. And they have also built up momentum in their Amazon Web Services division, providing storage and cloud services for many large businesses.

AWS has seen significant growth. The group accounted for $2.9 billion of Amazon’s quarterly revenue, up from $1.8 billion in the same period last year.

The company has built up a robust Prime business, where users pay annual subscriptions to get faster shipping and access to content like movies and music. Notably, Amazon created its own discount holiday last year called Prime Day. The sales day generatedsignificant traction this year and will be included in next quarter’s earnings.

The earnings release referenced this year’s Prime Day, calling it “the biggest day ever for Amazon.” They said that worldwide orders grew by more than 60 percent when compared to last year’s inaugural day.

Amazon also touted the success of its Fire TV media player, its latest Kindle e-book reader, and its Amazon Dash buttons.

Other Amazon experiments have missed the mark, however. They did not find success with their Fire Phone and the company recently shut down their Gilt Groupe competitor, MyHabit.

Going forward, the company is betting that drone deliveries will cut down on costs and improve efficiency. Amazon is also expanding its grocery business.

The stock is up 43 percent in the past year. The company has a market cap of $355 billion.

Amazon shares pop 10.6 percent following surprisingly good earnings

Amazon shares opened at $665.55 this morning, up 10.6 percent compared to yesterday’s closing price of $602. In other words, Amazon’s market capitalization just grew by nearly $30 billion.

Yesterday, Amazon announced some blockbuster earnings. This was the company’s most impressive quarter. In particular, Amazon Web Services is growing like crazy and could generate well over $10 billion in revenue in 2016.

Many companies would like to be as big as Amazon Web Services alone. But it looks like the company managed to turn a nifty little side business into a profitable subscription-based business.

And Amazon has also finally flipped the switch. For years, Amazon has been optimizing its margins to grow, grow and grow. The company didn’t care about generating profits. It only wanted to become bigger.

Now, while its net profit is ridiculous when you compare it to the company’s revenue, Amazon has generated $513 million in profit this quarter.

Can you guess how shareholders reacted? They loved it. On February 9 2016, Amazon shares were trading at $482.07 following a few months of great stock market performance.

In 80 days, Amazon shares popped more than 38 percent. While many people are wondering whether investors don’t care about tech companies anymore, there’s one thing for sure — they will never have enough of Amazon.