For Immediate Release
Chicago, IL – July 27, 2026 – Zacks Equity Research shares Corsair Gaming CRSR as the Bull of the Day and AngloGold Ashanti AU as the Bear of the Day. In addition, Zacks Equity Research provides analysis on Alphabet GOOGL, Microsoft MSFT and Baidu BIDU.
Here is a synopsis of all five stocks.
Bull of the Day:
Corsair Gaming is a Zack Rank #1 (Strong Buy) that has quietly morphed from a pandemic-hangover gaming stock into a turnaround story. Shares have ripped from roughly $5.50 in mid-February to north of $10 just this past week.
Investors are riding an AI-infrastructure narrative, giving the stock a new growth leg. With that, the stock is on verge of a technical breakout, along with earnings estimates moving in the right direction into earnings print.
About the Company
Corsair is best known to gamers for its keyboards, mice, headsets and PC components, but that’s only half the story now.
The Gamer and Creator Peripherals segment covers keyboards, mice, headsets, capture cards, Stream Decks and USB mics (largely under the Elgato brand), while the Gaming Components and Systems segment builds power supplies, cooling solutions, cases, DRAM and prebuilt/custom gaming PCs.
The company also owns Fanatec, the sim-racing gear maker that just signed a licensing deal with Nissan.
The real catalyst for the stock, though, is Corsair’s pivot into AI infrastructure. In May the company launched CORSAIR PRO, a lineup of AI workstations and on-prem servers built on Nvidia’s Grace Blackwell platform, aimed at businesses that want in-house AI compute instead of renting cloud capacity.
The company is valued at $1 billion and has a Forward PE of 14. The stock has Zacks Style Scores of “B” in Value and “A” in Growth.
The Beat That Changed the Story
Back in May, Corsair posted Q1 EPS of $0.27 against a $0.18 estimate, a beat of 50%. While revenue came in essentially in line at $354.5 million, Adjusted EBITDA nearly tripled year-over-year to $35.8 million. Margins jumped to 10.1% from 6.1%, and management pointed to a record first-quarter gross margin of 32.7% as evidence of a genuine shift toward higher-margin products rather than a one-off.
What makes this more than a good quarter is what came next: Corsair reaffirmed full-year guidance of $0.58-$0.74 EPS even after blowing past Q1 numbers. Management stayed conservative, blaming semiconductor and memory tightness that won’t ease until 2027, and that kind of caution after a 50% beat usually sets up future estimates to move higher.
Gamer and Creator Peripherals is the clean growth engine, with management calling it “structural, not cyclical,”. Stream Deck is expanding across product lines and Elgato’s marketplace posting double-digit sequential growth. Gaming Components and Systems is tougher, still working through a non-GPU upgrade cycle, but even there Q1 gross profit rose while revenue fell.
Estimates Head Higher
Analysts have revised EPS estimates higher across the board over the past 60 days.
Full-year consensus has climbed from $0.69 ninety days ago to $0.73 today, while next year’s estimate sits at $0.74. The current quarter has moved from $0.06 to $0.07 over that same stretch.
Roth Capital initiated coverage on July 22 with a Buy and a $15 price target, and B. Riley reiterated its rating the next day while raising its target to $9 from $7.50. Barclays (Overweight, $9) and Wedbush (Outperform, $8) have both lifted targets since May.
Corsair Gaming, Inc. price-consensus-eps-surprise-chart | Corsair Gaming, Inc. Quote
The Technical Take
The big move back in May gives traders a nice setup when looking at the Fibonacci levels. Drawing from March lows to May highs, we see the 61.8% level around $8 showed significant support. Traders can lean on this level or some of the moving averages levels below:
21-day: $9.45
50-day: $9.05
200-day: $6.95
Looking at the upside, the stock would need to clear the $11.15 level, which would give 161.8% Fibonacci extension targets at $16.
In Summary
Corsair checks the boxes value investors want in a Bull of the Day: a Zacks Rank #1 with estimates moving higher across every timeframe, a stock breaking out technically with room to run toward that $16 extension target, and a fundamental story — the AI-infrastructure pivot layered on top of a genuine margin transformation — that’s just getting picked up by the sell side. With earnings due July 30, this is a name worth having on the radar heading into the print.
Bear of the Day:
AngloGold Ashanti is a Zacks Rank #5 (Strong Sell) that is experiencing the flip side of the gold trade. The stock rode bullion’s historic run to a 52-week high of $132 earlier this year, but shares have since slid to the $80 area.
Gold itself has cooled from January’s record near $5,626 an ounce to around $4,000-$4,100 today. When the metal you dig out of the ground does the heavy lifting for your earnings, a 25%-plus pullback in that metal shows up fast in the numbers.
About the Company
AngloGold Ashanti is a global gold miner with operations across Africa, Australia and the Americas, anchored by its flagship Geita mine in Tanzania.
It’s a straightforward business model: dig up gold, sell it near the spot price, and let the metal’s direction drive the P&L far more than any operational lever management pulls. That’s been a gift over the past two years as gold roughly tripled off its 2020 lows, but it cuts both ways when the price turns.
The Quarter Behind the Beat
AngloGold’s last reported quarter looked strong on the surface, with EPS of $2.52 beating estimates by about 14%. Earnings were up 186% year-over-year, with a record $1.169 billion in free cash flow.
But revenue of $3.15 billion missed the $3.34 billion consensus. This is because gold production held roughly flat at 724,000 ounces, gold actually sold fell to 719,000 ounces from 737,000 a year earlier, partly due to the December 2025 sale of the Serra Grande mine.
Costs also crept higher, with total cash costs rising to $1,391/oz from $1,223/oz. This means the bottom-line beat leaned entirely on price, not on selling more gold or running a leaner operation. Management still funded a record $1.16/share dividend and a new $2.0 billion buyback, but this will become harder to repeat if the gold price that drove it keeps sliding.
Estimates Rolling Over
Analyst estimates have been revised lower across the board over the past 30 and 60 days.
The current-year EPS consensus has come down to $8.23 from $9.26 sixty days ago, and next year’s estimate has fallen to $7.62 from $8.86 over the same stretch.
Current-quarter estimates have slipped to $2.02 from $2.16.
With that some analysts are lowering price targets, including JPMorgan which took its target to $134 from $155.
Technicals
The stock has had a big run since 2024, moving from $20 to $130, recently falling to $80. The good news is the stock has held the halfway back level at $75. The bad news is if gold falls lower, the stock could see a full 61.8% Fibonacci retrace down to the $63 area.
The moving averages will likely offer resistance above, so watch the 50-day ay $86 and the 200-day at $90 for selling.
In Summary
AngloGold Ashanti is a well-run miner in a tough spot: its entire 2026 earnings story has been a gold-price story, and that price has cooled meaningfully off its highs. With estimates trending lower across every timeframe this is a name where the risk looks tilted to the downside into upcoming earnings.
For investors who like their risk-reward balanced, the Zacks Rank #5 says look elsewhere.
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GOOGL Bets on AI to Defend Search Leadership: More Upside Ahead?
Alphabet‘s Search-related endeavors have received a massive push through AI integrations. The company is leading the search domain with 91.27% market share, followed by Microsoft‘s Bing, with 4.68% share, Yahoo!’s 1.28%, Yandex’s 0.79%, DuckDuckGo’s 0.67% and Baidu‘s 0.46%, per the latest data from StatCounter.
Alphabet’s dominance is being reinforced by rapid AI innovation rather than disrupted by it. On the second-quarter 2026 earnings call, the company highlighted that AI Overviews and AI Mode have been integrated into a single seamless Search experience, helping drive higher user engagement and incremental search queries. AI Mode has already surpassed one billion monthly active users, while Google continues to send billions of clicks to websites every week through its AI-powered search features, addressing concerns that AI could reduce web traffic.
Search monetization also remains strong. Google Search & Other revenues climbed 17% year over year to $63.3 billion, driven primarily by retail and finance advertisers. Alphabet noted that Gemini-powered improvements in query understanding allow Google to better monetize longer, more complex searches by delivering more relevant advertisements. AI-powered advertising products such as AI Max are already being widely adopted, with advertisers using these tools seeing higher conversions at similar returns on ad spend.
Alphabet is also expanding Search beyond traditional web queries into an AI-powered productivity platform. The company recently introduced integrations that allow users to connect services such as Instacart, Canva and YouTube Music directly within AI Mode, enabling actions like creating shopping carts, generating design templates and building playlists without leaving Search. These capabilities deepen user engagement while making Google’s ecosystem more valuable and difficult for competitors to replicate.
GOOGL Faces Tough Competition in the Search Domain
Alphabet faces competition from Microsoft and Baidu in the Search domain.
Microsoft is strengthening its search ecosystem through Bing and Edge by embedding advanced AI capabilities across its consumer products. Microsoft is also integrating proprietary AI models into Bing, improving image generation, speech recognition and search experiences while benefiting from broader investments in Copilot, Azure AI and its multi-model strategy. These enhancements are designed to increase user engagement, improve search relevance and capture a larger share of digital advertising, creating a stronger competitive challenge for Google in AI-powered search.
Baidu is also accelerating its AI-first search strategy, particularly in China. The company has highlighted continued improvements in AI Search through enhanced planning, content generation and content-quality evaluation, enabling more intelligent and higher-quality search results while reducing low-quality content. Baidu plans to further integrate AI Search with ERNIE Assistant to improve information discovery, content understanding and task completion. The company has also reiterated that AI Search remains one of its highest-priority applications and will continue to receive investments to strengthen search accuracy and user experience.
GOOGL’s Share Price Performance, Valuation & Estimates
Alphabet shares have returned 1.5% year to date (YTD), outperforming the broader Zacks Computer and Technology sector’s return of 10.8%.
GOOGL stock is trading at a premium, with a forward 12-month price/sales of 8.07X compared with the broader sector’s 6.46X. Alphabet has a Value Score of D.
The Zacks Consensus Estimate for 2026 earnings is pegged at $14.34 per share, up 0.3% over the past 30 days, suggesting 32.65% growth from 2025’s reported figure.
Alphabet Inc. price-consensus-chart | Alphabet Inc. Quote
Alphabet currently carries a Zacks Rank #3 (Hold). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
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