Cisco falls 8.4% on a beat; Workday jumps on buyout talks

Thursday’s session ended at a record — the S&P 500 up 0.65% to 7,798.99, the Nasdaq Composite up 0.81% to 26,803, and 74 of the 100 largest caps higher — yet the two biggest single-name moves both fought their own numbers. July retail sales at 8:30am ET is the day’s scheduled test.

Cisco dropped 8.4% on a beat and a raise

Cisco closed down 8.40% at $113.47 on 61.2 million shares, roughly 137% above its three-month average of 25.7 million — the heaviest volume and largest decline in the large-cap block. It was not a miss: adjusted EPS of $1.22 beat the $1.17 consensus, revenue of $17.25 billion beat $16.82 billion and rose 18% year over year, GAAP net income rose 51% to $3.9 billion, and guidance went up. The company pointed to $9.3 billion of AI infrastructure orders booked in FY26 and remaining performance obligations of $46.7 billion, up 7%. The attributed reason for the selling was gross-margin pressure, in a stock that had come into the print up nearly 50% year to date. Peer read-through was partial rather than uniform — Arista fell 3.27% and Texas Instruments 1.14%, but Hewlett Packard Enterprise rose 1.75%.

Applied Materials’ 2.48% decline came before the numbers

Applied Materials closed down 2.48% at $534.54, and that print is the regular session — the fiscal Q3 call was Thursday at 4:30pm ET, after the bell. The results themselves were strong: revenue of $9.115 billion, up 25% year over year and 15% sequentially, non-GAAP EPS of $3.50, and a raised calendar-2026 outlook, against management’s own prior guide of $8.95 billion and $3.36. The Q4 guide is revenue of about $10.25 billion, plus or minus $500 million, with non-GAAP EPS around $4.02. Anyone reading the 2.48% as the market’s verdict on those numbers has the sequence backwards.

Workday’s 17.8% jump is a deal report, not results

Workday closed up 17.80% at $206.50 on 16.3 million shares, the top mover, after a Reuters exclusive said Silver Lake has been in talks for months to take the company private, with Benzinga reporting a valuation of up to $43 billion and the possibility of co-investors. Nothing is announced and the reporting rests on unnamed sources. The stock had been down about 15% in 2026 before the move, with co-founder Aneel Bhusri back as CEO since March. The report was also read as a bid for beaten-down software generally, and Thursday’s gainer list fits: MongoDB +7.87% to $472.29, essentially at its 52-week high, Cloudflare +6.22%, Roblox +6.78%, Datadog +4.70%, Palantir +4.66%. Netflix’s +5.43% to $78.24 came from a Pershing Square position of 3.15 million shares — a bounce in a chart still about 42% below its high, not a breakout.

Overnight: China tech soft, gold lower, oil quiet

Asia was mixed on Friday. The Nikkei 225 rose 0.3% to 68,533.85 and the Kospi 1.3% to 6,924.74, while the Hang Seng fell about 1% to 25,137.87 and the Shanghai Composite 0.5%, with Tencent down 4.5% after Q2 results — the same thread that showed up as Alibaba’s 2.44% decline in Thursday’s US session. US futures were little changed. Gold’s proxy GLD fell 1.47% to $398.96. Crude has been steady after Brent lost more than 7% the prior week as hopes for a quick Hormuz reopening faded; transits ran 8 to 15 vessels a day in early August against roughly 130 before the conflict. Outside the large caps, Omeros closed up 26.68% at $17.33 after Tuesday’s post-close report showed revenue of $28.5 million against $12.7 million expected.

What to watch today

July retail sales, 8:30am ET
How Applied Materials trades in its first session after the post-close report: revenue $9.115B, Q4 guide of about $10.25B and non-GAAP EPS near $4.02
Any confirmation, denial or formal statement from Workday or Silver Lake
Whether Cisco’s margin story spreads to networking peers, after Arista −3.27% and HPE +1.75% split on Thursday
China tech follow-through after Tencent −4.5% and Hang Seng −1%

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.