Stocks making the biggest moves premarket: Home Depot, Amer Sports, Blackstone, Alphabet & more

Home Depot and Amer Sports both beat first-quarter expectations, with Home Depot reporting adjusted EPS of $3.43 versus $3.41 expected and revenue of $41.77 billion versus $41.52 billion. Amer Sports posted 38 cents in adjusted EPS versus 31 cents expected and revenue of $1.95 billion versus $1.84 billion. Blackstone and Alphabet rose 0.7% after Blackstone committed $5 billion to a new AI infrastructure venture with Google, while chip stocks remained under pressure, with Micron down 1.7%, Seagate down 3%, and Nvidia off nearly 1%.

Analysis

The clearest signal here is not the individual earnings beats, but the breadth of resilient demand in two very different consumer-linked categories: housing renovation and premium athletic apparel. That matters because both names are showing pricing power and cleaner inventory dynamics despite still-elevated rates and a cautious consumer backdrop, which implies the “soft landing” trade is being underwritten by household balance sheets more than by macro improvement. In contrast, the weakness in chips looks less like a single-stock issue and more like a continuing de-rating of the AI hardware stack where near-term capacity and memory pricing are not matching the hype cycle.

For the AI complex, the Blackstone/Alphabet announcement is strategically bullish for infrastructure buildout, but the second-order effect is that capital intensity is migrating upstream into power, data-center land, and financing rather than into pure semis. That is constructive for asset owners and cloud/platform names, but it can be a headwind for GPU and memory vendors if hyperscalers become more selective on incremental capex return thresholds. The fact that Nvidia is trading weak despite the AI headline suggests the market is starting to distinguish between AI monetization at the application/platform layer and the more cyclical hardware beneficiaries.

The downside risk on the retail winners is that their beats may be partly backward-looking: if rates stay high into the summer, discretionary remodeling and premium sportswear could decelerate as delayed housing turnover and consumer trade-downs catch up. For chips, the selloff could persist for weeks if memory pricing keeps deteriorating, because investors will keep fading any rally until end-demand visibility improves. The near-term catalyst to watch is guidance cadence over the next 30-60 days; if management commentary starts softening, these “beat-and-hold” names can quickly become multiple compression stories.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Stay long HD vs. short a basket of rate-sensitive homebuilders for the next 4-8 weeks; HD has cleaner execution and share gains, while housing beta should remain hostage to mortgage-rate stickiness.
• Initiate a tactical long AS / short discretionary apparel pair for 1-3 months; AS has stronger premium brand elasticity, but use a tight stop if consumer trade-down data worsens.
• Fade NVDA on strength via short-dated puts or a call spread overwrite into any AI infrastructure-driven pop; the risk/reward favors a 1-2 month view that hardware leadership can lag as capital rotates to power and platforms.
• Add BX as a financing/alternative-asset expression tied to AI capex, but size modestly; upside is multi-quarter if the infrastructure buildout broadens, while downside is limited unless funding spreads widen materially.
• Use memory weakness to short the weakest semis or memory-exposed names rather than chasing broad index shorts; the current setup favors relative-value downside over outright market beta.