Farhan Badami, Market Analyst at eToro Group Ltd, shares his three things to watch in Australia in the coming days.
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) earnings
AMD reports Q2 2025 earnings on Tuesday, with investors eyeing its AI chip momentum against Nvidia’s dominance. Shares are up over 40% year-to-date, reflecting optimism about AMD’s data centre growth. Q1 was strong as revenue hit US$7.44 billion, up 36% year-over-year, driven by record data centre sales, but a recent ~8% pullback over the last couple of days signals valuation concerns.
Gaming revenue dropped 30% and U.S. export restrictions could impact up to US$800 million in AI chip sales to China. Still, analysts are expecting another solid quarter with growth in GPUs and new AI accelerators potentially lifting sentiment.
There is definitely a lot of hype around AMD’s AI potential, but caution about Nvidia competition and macro risks. A strong beat or raised AI guidance could propel shares, but soft gaming numbers or supply chain hiccups might trigger a sell-off.
Atlassian earnings
Atlassian’s quarterly earnings are due on Thursday in the US, and they will be arriving against a backdrop of moderate controversy, thanks to the well-publicised capers of CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes.
These earnings are coming in on the heels of a 150-staff axing, carried out via a ‘cold’ pre-recorded video. That may not equate to a poor performance overall, but it demonstrates how a ‘personality CEO’ can create a problematic narrative if left unaddressed.
That problem has not evaded investors either, causing some pain to the share price. It’s one of several hits the stock has suffered recently; Cannon-Brookes also recently shed over US$1.6million in shares, sending stocks plunging 9%.
In terms of the earnings themselves, loyal investors will be putting their faith in the increased demand for cybersecurity and AI automation, both of which are global needs that Atlassian can fulfil. As we saw in the previous quarter, the company continues to grow its revenue but poor net margin and return on equity performance points to ongoing profitability issues, even as it succeeds in addressing wider SaaS demands.
It’s hard to see any clear sign that this quarter’s results will have meaningfully moved the needle on that ongoing concern, but there won’t be much to alarm investors that are in for the long haul. Cannon-Brookes’ share sell-off seems more like a liquidity management play rather than a loss in confidence in his company, and layoffs during a period of tech innovation and broader industry recalibration is nothing new. Still, there is now a target painted squarely on the back of Cannon-Brookes that must be dealt with in order to restore broader confidence in the company’s leadership.
Palantir earnings
Palantir’s latest earnings report comes out Monday US time. The datamining software specialist has been going from strength to strength recently. The US Army has just announced that it is consolidating ‘dozens’ of contracts into a singular enterprise deal with Palantir, enabling US$10b worth of software purchases over the next 10 years.
In the AI age, Palantir’s value proposition is evident to most investors. Its business offering extends across commercial and government interests, and it has been experiencing business growth across both categories. With two decades of deep AI development under its belt, no amount of industry hype is likely to push competitors ahead of Palantir’s deep-seated expertise and extensive client portfolio.
The challenge will be for Palantir to provide substantiation for its high valuation, which has been increasingly scrutinised by analysts. How can they do this? Well, the company’s Q1 results showed us that government contracts still drive most of the company’s revenue, and the main target for improvement was commercial revenue outside of the US. If we see significant growth in offshore commercial revenue, that valuation will begin to look much more proportionate to markets.