Market Wrap · July 31, 2026
Amazon Surges 15% on Blowout AWS Growth, Apple Falls 7% on Guidance
U.S. equities closed narrowly higher on Friday, July 31, masking one of the most dispersed sessions of the year underneath the surface. The S&P 500 (SPY) rose 0.72% to $747.03, the Nasdaq-100 (QQQ) added 0.65% to $687.99, and the Dow (DIA) gained 0.54% to $524.32, while the small-cap Russell 2000 (IWM) slipped 0.48% to $291.20. The calm index-level numbers came almost entirely from a wave of Big Tech earnings reports that sent individual stocks swinging by double digits in both directions on the same day.
Amazon was the session’s biggest mover, surging 15.32% to $271.58 after a second-quarter report showing its fastest revenue growth in five years, roughly 20% year over year. AWS revenue grew 37% to $42.2 billion — its fastest pace in 18 quarters — and Amazon’s AI and custom-chips businesses each now exceed $25 billion in annual run-rate revenue with triple-digit growth, per Motley Fool’s reporting. The company raised its 2026 capital-expenditure plan to $220 billion and posted negative free cash flow of $7.6 billion over the trailing twelve months, a $26 billion swing from a year earlier, but investors read the spending as evidence AI infrastructure is converting into revenue rather than just cost.
Apple moved the opposite direction on its own report, falling 7.35% to $308.91 despite beating estimates: revenue rose 16% to $109.4 billion and iPhone sales jumped 22% to $54.3 billion. The selloff was driven entirely by forward guidance — management guided fiscal fourth-quarter growth to 9–11%, below the roughly 12% analysts expected, and gross margins to 47–48%, down from over 50%, citing worsening component-supply constraints tied to surging memory costs from AI-infrastructure demand. CEO Tim Cook said the shortages reflect unexpectedly strong demand rather than a supply-chain breakdown.
Alphabet rose 6.73% to $356.13 on its own earnings and confirmation of roughly $200 billion in planned 2026 AI-infrastructure spending; Microsoft added 3.02% to $464.72 on strong cloud results and $678 billion of contracted future revenue; and Meta gained 3.28% to $556.71 despite soft near-term guidance, after disclosing plans for a new cloud-computing business on its earnings call.
Memory and crypto lagged
Micron fell 5.90% to $823.03 and Sandisk fell 5.09% to $1,214.83, giving back an early pop tied to Apple’s and Amazon’s own memory-spending commentary as Treasury yields rose to 19-year highs and pressured growth stocks broadly. Coinbase fell 10.59% to $146.26 after a second-quarter earnings miss driven by weak crypto-trading revenue; bitcoin fell 2.93% to $62,825.90 and ether fell 2.92% to $1,860.66, in a crypto-wide decline also tied to Federal Reserve rate-hike speculation and doubts about pending crypto legislation.