AMD's record quarter closed down 7%, and breadth was 50/50
AMD beat on both lines and guided to about $13B — then closed down 7.04%. Shopify +16.98%, Lilly +4.86%, and large-cap breadth exactly 50 up, 50 down.
AMD reported a record quarter, beat on revenue and earnings, guided Q3 to roughly $13 billion — and closed down 7.04%. On a day headlines called a record rally, the large-cap tape split exactly 50 advancing, 50 declining.
AMD: the number was fine, the reaction wasn’t
AMD’s revenue rose 50% year over year to a record $11.54 billion, adjusted EPS came in at $1.66 against $1.62 expected, and data center sales doubled to $6.7 billion — 58% of the company. Management guided Q3 to about $13 billion, plus or minus $300 million. The stock closed at $482.05, down 7.04%. The explanation on offer is positioning rather than fundamentals: AMD cleared Wall Street’s published targets but not the far higher bar already in the share price. Note the gap in circulating figures — press accounts cite −5%, −6.9% and −7%; the closing move was −7.04%.
Guidance decided everything else
Shopify rose 16.98% to $144.24 on 40.5 million shares, with revenue up 34% to $3.58 billion (a $130 million beat), adjusted EPS of $0.42 versus $0.40, and Q3 growth guided in the low-30% range. Eli Lilly gained 4.86% to $1,169.86 on EPS of $8.38 and revenue up 47.7% to $22.97 billion, lifting full-year guidance to $85–87 billion from up to $85 billion; Novo Nordisk traded lower on the read-across. Uber fell 5.29% to $68.18 despite 22% bookings growth and trailing-twelve-month free cash flow above $10 billion, because Q3 guidance landed just under the Street at both the bookings midpoint ($59.25B vs $59.33B) and EPS ($0.84–0.88 vs $0.89). Alphabet’s 4.03% drop to $362.43 was not earnings at all — Demis Hassabis moves to DeepMind chair and Alphabet chief scientist, Koray Kavukcuoglu becomes SVP of DeepMind reporting to Sundar Pichai, and Jeff Dean is leaving.
Moves that don’t fit the narrative
The AI complex was not one trade: Nvidia rose 3.43% on 156.4 million shares, the heaviest volume in the large-cap block, while AMD, Qualcomm (−3.16%), Applied Materials (−2.26%), Palantir (−2.60%) and Cloudflare (−2.78%) all fell. Gold’s largest ETF gained 4.14% to $389.64, a big day for that instrument; no catalyst has emerged. And two oilfield-services names, Select Water (+20.4%) and Oil States (+18.8%), posted roughly 20% gains on a session when Brent held near $79 — awkward for the prevailing easing-oil story.
Asia reversed; the day’s calendar
Asia handed back about a third of Wednesday’s rally: the Nikkei fell 1.2% to 65,538.44 after gaining 3.7% the day before, Hang Seng dropped 1.8% to 25,463.51, Shanghai was nearly unchanged at 3,878.92, and the ASX 200 added 0.5%. South Korea’s Kospi was the outlier, down more than 4% as SK Hynix and other large tech names fell — a sharp disagreement with Nvidia’s 3.43% gain in the US session. European shares hit an intraday record Thursday on earnings optimism, with Iran proposals still unresolved in the background. Warner Bros. Discovery reports before the bell; Airbnb (closed +1.71%), Lyft and Cloudflare (closed −2.78%) report after the close.
What to watch today
- Warner Bros. Discovery earnings before the open
- Airbnb, Lyft and Cloudflare earnings after the close
- Expiration of the SpaceX IPO lockup
- July jobs report, Friday 8:30 am ET
- CPI, Wednesday August 12, 8:30 am ET
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.