Apple falls 7% on memory costs as Amazon surges 15%
Friday split the market: Amazon and Alphabet ripped higher while Apple shed roughly $400 billion on supply guidance. Just 48 of 100 large caps advanced.
The index closed green on Friday and that number hides almost everything worth knowing. Beneath it, fewer than half of the 100 largest US names advanced, and the AI trade started charging its costs to companies that aren’t selling AI.
The split
Amazon rose 15.3% to $271.58 on heavy volume, Alphabet added 6.7%, Microsoft and Meta each gained about 3%. That was enough to carry the index higher.
It was not a broad rally. By the close, 48 of the 100 large caps we track were advancing and 52 were falling. Roblox dropped 26.9%, Reddit 21.0%, Coinbase 10.6%, and Rivian 9.6%. A market where the four biggest names do the lifting and the rest sink is not the same market the headline number describes.
Apple’s problem is everyone else’s demand
Apple fell 7.4% to $308.91 on volume of 132 million shares — its worst session since March 2020, and somewhere around $400 billion of market value gone in a day. Nvidia took back the title of most valuable company days after Apple had reclaimed it.
The quarter itself was fine. Revenue of $109.4 billion and $2.02 per share both came in ahead of estimates. The damage was in the guidance: management pointed to 9-11% revenue growth this quarter against roughly 11.8% expected, and said supply constraints would worsen considerably into the September quarter, affecting iPhone, iPad and Mac availability. The reason given was memory costs, driven by the datacenter buildout bidding up the same components Apple needs. Services growth also slowed, with China weakness, softer mobile gaming and App Store business-model changes all cited.
That is a different kind of bad quarter. Apple is not losing to a competitor; it is being outbid for parts by the AI buildout.
A number that doesn’t fit the story
If memory prices are squeezing Apple’s margins, the memory makers should be the obvious beneficiaries. Micron fell 5.9% on Friday.
We don’t have a clean explanation for that, and we’d rather flag it than invent one. It’s the kind of contradiction worth resolving before drawing conclusions from the memory-cost narrative.
What to watch today
- Palantir and ON Semiconductor report early in the week; AMD, Caterpillar and Pfizer follow, with Shopify, Disney and McDonald’s midweek
- JOLTS job openings Wednesday and ADP private payrolls Thursday, both feeding into Friday’s July employment report
- The July jobs report Friday, with consensus near 85,000 and unemployment expected to tick up to 4.3% from 4.2%
- ISM manufacturing and services readings through the week
- Whether Apple’s supply-chain guidance shows up in other hardware names, or stays company-specific
Not financial advice. iTrading Buddy summarizes publicly available market data and news; every figure above is sourced from the reporting available before the US open on the date shown. Verify anything you act on.