Microsoft is slipping ahead of earnings

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• Microsoft is slipping ahead of its fourth-quarter earnings results which will be released after the closing bell Thursday.
• Investors will be keying in on cloud and personal-computing results.
• Wach Microsoft trade in real time here.

Microsoft is sliding Thursday ahead of its fiscal-fourth-quarter earnings results. It's down 0.49% to $104.60 a share.

Wall Street is expecting earnings of $1.08 per share on revenue of $29.22 billion, according to Bloomberg.

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As usual, investors will be keying in on the performance of the tech behemoth's cloud business. "We believe management and investors will likely focus on Microsoft's continued cloud efforts," Jefferies analyst John Difucci wrote in a note out to clients.

Microsoft and Amazon have been locked in a battle in the cloud space, as the two sit atop the leaderboard of market share. Microsoft's commercial-cloud sales soared 58% year-over-year in the fiscal third quarter, helping move the stock up after the earnings day in April.

Also of particular interest to investors is the performance of personal-computing sales, which Difucci thinks could ultimately drive an EPS beat.

"Positive PC results could drive Windows upside and EPS outperformance," he said. "Historically, Windows has tracked closely to PC unit sales in the developed regions of the world."

Millennials are piling into the stock ahead of earnings. Data from Robinhood, a free trading app popular amongst millennials, shows that users added 3,711 positions to Microsoft stock in the past week. That makes the stock one of the most popular this past week amongst Robinhood's 100 most owned stocks.

Shares are up 21.82% this year.

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