Wall St. flat as earnings from some big names disappoint

U.S. stocks were little changed in early trading on Thursday after the S&P and the Nasdaq touched all-time highs as earnings from some big names disappointed.

Qualcomm (QCOM.O) fell 4.4 percent after the chipmaker's forecast missed estimates. 

Cigarette maker Philip Morris (PM.N) was down 2.8 percent after its quarterly profit came in below expectations. 

Home Depot (HD.N) was off 2.7 percent and weighed on the Dow and the S&P. 

Still, overall earnings continue to beat expectations which, along with a rally in technology shares, helped all three major indexes to close at a record high on Wednesday. 

Analysts are estimating an 8.7 percent rise in second-quarter earnings and a 4.6 percent increase in revenue for the S&P 500 companies from a year earlier, according to Thomson Reuters I/B/E/S. 

Visa (V.N), eBay (EBAY.O), Capital One Financial (COF.N) are due to report results after the closing bell.

The S&P 500 tech sector .SPLRCT, which has been the best performing sector this year, broke its previous record closing high that had held since March 2000 in the midst of the dot-com and Y2K tech stocks bubble. 

Microsoft (MSFT.O) will report results after the market close. Other major tech names such as Alphabet (GOOGL.O), Facebook (FB.O) and Amazon (AMZN.O) are due to report results next week.