As noted earlier, Roth Capital initiated Yelp (YELP) with a Sell rating and a $17.50 price target. The firm says that Google (GOOG) and Facebook's (FB) recent local search initiatives highlight the low barriers of entry of indexing local businesses and writing reviews about them. According to the firm, these areas are key to Yelp's businesses. Roth believes that the initiatives by Google and Facebook have hindered Yelp's mobile user and local ad revenues growth. Yelp will have to respond by spending more on marketing, pressuring its margins, contended the firm.

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Loop Capital raised the firm's price target on Alphabet to $170 from $155 and keeps a Hold rating on the shares after its Q1 earnings beat last week. The company's core businesses are strong, the management appears to be doing a good job in "durably reengineering" its cost base, and there is probably room to further manage strong bottom-line results, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Greater expense discipline assumptions keep the firm's out-year estiamtes "meaningfully" ahead of consensus, Loop added.

Amazon (AMZN) is scheduled to report results of its first quarter of 2024 after the market close on Tuesday, April 30, with a conference call scheduled for 5:30 pm ET. Here's what to... To see the rest of the story go to thefly.com. See Story Here

Argus raised the firm's price target on Alphabet to $200 from $170 and keeps a Buy rating on the shares. The analyst cites the company's Q1 operating income growth of 46% against 16% revenue growth as margins benefited from cost optimization efforts during the year, the analyst tells investors in a research note. Alphabet also remains an advertising juggernaut despite possible serious threats from competing generative AI platforms to its Search business and antitrust litigation/regulatory pressure, while its YouTube and Google Cloud businesses are "doing just fine" as the company spikes investment in its own competitive AI applications as well as compute infrastructure, Argus added.

Apple (AAPL) has poached at least 36 AI experts from Google (GOOGL) and has created a laboratory in Zurich in an effort to develop new AI models and products, Michael Acton of The Financial Times reports. According to an analysis performed by the Times of LinkedIn profiles, public job postings, and research papers, the company has undertaken a hiring spree over the past few years to expand its AI and machine learning team. Reference Link

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Microsoft (MSFT), Meta (META), and Alphabet (GOOGL) disclosed last week that they had spent more than $32B combined on data centers and other capital expenses in Q1, as they accelerate AI spending, The New York Times' Karen Weise reports. The companies all said in calls with investors that they had no plans to slow down their AI spending, Weise writes. Reference Link