U.S. stocks are drifting slightly higher at midday Friday as two of the market's largest companies move in opposite directions.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI +0.55%) is up 0.3% as of 12:14 p.m. ET. The S&P 500 (^GSPC +0.59%) has added 0.2%, on pace for its first winning week in three. The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC +0.81%) index is also up 0.2%, well off an intraday high near 1.3% reached shortly after the open.
Why Amazon and Apple went their separate ways
Amazon (AMZN +15.11%) stole the show, jumping 14.9% after posting $200.6 billion in second-quarter revenue. The real headline was Amazon Web Services, where sales grew 37% from a year ago; that's the fastest AWS has grown in 18 quarters. Management reaffirmed a full-year capex outlook of near $220 billion. The report confirmed that heavy AI infrastructure investment is translating into accelerating cloud demand. Amazon alone added roughly 208 points to the Dow.
Apple (AAPL -9.63%) subtracted about 188 points from the Dow, nearly erasing Amazon's contribution. The iPhone maker's stock fell 9.4% despite an analyst-stumping Q3 report. Management's next-quarter guidance was muted, citing component supply constraints tied to the AI hardware boom. Many chips are both pricey and hard to come by in this market.
Image source: Getty Images.
It was a mixed bag of chips today. The iShares Semiconductor ETF (SOXX +1.75%) gained 0.7%, but memory names lagged. Micron Technology (MU -2.62%) fell 5.3%, for instance. Investors at the corner of Wall Street and Silicon Valley are sorting out mixed signals from four Magnificent 7 stocks this week.
Macro pressures capped the bullish market mood. Oil prices rose as Middle East tensions flared back up. The 10-year Treasury yield ticked up 5 basis points to 4.7% and gold slipped 1.6%.
The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP -0.07%) dipped 0.3% while the cap-weighted index trackers rose by the same amount. In other words, the typical stock is actually red today. Mega caps are the ones lifting the S&P 500 above breakeven.
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Zooming out on a wild July
Sound familiar? It should. You saw a similar script playing out earlier this week.
Prove that AI spending pays off, and the market throws you a party; show up without a cloud business to justify the hype, and you get sent to the corner. The dunce cap is optional.
Microsoft's (MSFT +2.13%) Azure numbers sparked Thursday's rally, Amazon's AWS numbers are fueling Friday's, and Apple just got the same cold shoulder that Meta Platforms (META +1.84%) did yesterday.
That's July 2026 in a nutshell: noisy, headline-driven, and carried by a handful of giants while the average stock quietly drifts lower. Apple's slide and Amazon's surge will fade from the headlines soon enough. The businesses converting AI spending into cloud revenue are the ones worth tracking long after today.
