Dow Jones leads other indices on Monday ahead of Home Depot, Salesforce, Nvidia earnings

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) is winning Monday once again as a slate of high-profile earnings reports this week gives the legacy index an edge over its competitors. The DJIA is up 0.4% at lunchtime in New York, while the S&P 500 is flat and the NASDAQ sheds 0.4%.

The Home Depot (HD) gets the ball rolling on Tuesday, and both Nvidia (NVDA) and Salesforce (CRM) are scheduled to release results on Wednesday. With just 30 constituents compared to the much larger number of holdings in the S&P 500 and the NASDAQ, the Dow is drawing more interest at the start of the trading week due to its concentration of high-profile reporters.

The broad United States (US) stock market has begun the week in a spirit of uncertainty as reports emerged over the weekend that the Trump administration is mulling new global tariff options. Previous tariffs on China, as well as tariffs on the import of steel and aluminum, have been announced, and previously announced 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada might still go into effect on March 1 after being delayed at the start of February.

JPMorgan was out with a client note on Monday exhorting investors to expect further tariffs and for the anti-free trade rhetoric to continue. The Trump administration has been fickle in the first month of this administration, cascading back and forth between harsh tariff rhetoric and optimism in reaching less onerous trade deals. 

“We see tariff headline news flow risk as a continuous theme through this year, and beyond. If the trade war escalates, business confidence generally will be hit, but the US is likely to be less affected than others,” JPMorgan analysts wrote.

Statements from the administration have been injuring the share prices of many high-profile stocks on Monday. Alibaba (BABA) stock is down more than 9% on news saying that the Trump administration is considering further actions against China, while Palantir (PLTR) shed a similar amount following last week’s news that the Defense Department is looking to cut its budget by as much as 8% per year over several years, although some of that revenue could be shifted to new projects.

The Home Depot earnings preview

The Home Depot is expected to release earnings for the fiscal fourth quarter of 2025 before the market opens on Tuesday. Wall Street expects the building and household goods retail to report adjusted earnings per share (EPS) of $3.04 on revenue of $39.07 billion. 

You would have to go back to 2020 to find a quarter where The Home Depot missed the bottom line, but the retailer has missed the revenue consensus figure on several occasions over the past two years.

The consensus EPS figure is about 8% above the reported number one year earlier, and the revenue figure is expected to gain more than 12% YoY.

Analysts have been worried by inflation affecting consumer spending in this category over the past year, but Wedbush analyst Seth Basham sees a silver lining. Basham says that the last quarter’s 1.3% drop in comparable same-store sales should give Q4 a greater ability to report gains. 

Additionally, analysts believe that US wildfires and hurricanes in the past few months will lead to higher demand in certain home renovation categories. 

HD daily stock chart

Nvidia earnings preview

Nvidia will unveil fiscal Q4 results after the close on Wednesday. Wall Street is expecting the GPU leader to report $0.85 per share in adjusted EPS on $38.15 billion.

This amounts to a 63% gain in EPS compared with a year earlier and a nearly 73% increase in revenue.

With Microsoft announcing a reduction in spending on data center capex, Wall Street will want to know whether the AI revolution is picking up steam or leveling off. This will make the outlook from CEO Jensen Huang all the more important to share price dynamics.

The typically optimistic Wedbush analysts have placed their money on another “beat and raise” announcement. 

“We believe demand is far outstripping supply with Blackwell [GPUs] in the field and after speaking with many enterprise AI customers, we have seen not one AI enterprise deployment slow down or change due to the DeepSeek situation,” writes the Wedbush office.

NVDA daily stock chart

Salesforce earnings preview

Competing with Nvidia for eyeballs on Wednesday will be CEO Marc Benioff’s Salesforce. After boasting about signing large numbers of new corporate clients for its Agentforce AI product, the market will probably be entirely focused on that number this time around.

Back in Q3, Benioff said that the recently launched Agentforce, which helps clients build their own AI agents for customer service and other uses, had already garnered 200 corporate signup deals. But he expected Q4 would see thousands of deals inked with customers.

On Monday, Salesforce announced a deal to offer its Agentforce platform through Alphabet’s (GOOGL) Google Cloud.

Wedbush’s Dan Ives says that the AI story could add $80 to the CRM share price and reiterated his price target of $425.

Wall Street is expecting the leader in customer relationship management software to report adjusted EPS of $2.61 on just over $10 billion in revenue.

CRM daily stock chart