Markets News, July 31: Dow Logs Slim July Gains as Nasdaq, S&P 500 Slip; Amazon Stock Soars, Apple Sinks Friday

U.S. stocks ended Friday, July 31, 2026, the last trading session of the month, with gains across the S&P 500, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the Nasdaq Composite. The month ended unevenly: the Dow finished July slightly higher, while the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq posted small monthly declines. The market panel above shows the closing levels and daily changes. This coverage explains what drove the session: a heavy run of big-tech earnings, a bond market reacting to the Federal Reserve, a new round of tariffs, and several large single-stock moves.

Each section takes one driver and places it in weekly, monthly or year-to-date context where that context is known. Figures quoted for individual stocks are the session or intraday moves reported that day. Where a move was measured before the opening bell or during trading rather than at the close, that is stated, because premarket and intraday changes often differ from the final print.

How the Week and the Month Finished

The week was volatile. All three major indexes opened higher on Friday, slipped into negative territory for a stretch, then turned back up and held their gains into the close. That intraday reversal capped five sessions that included a sharp sell-off on Wednesday, after the Federal Reserve left interest rates unchanged despite continuing concern about inflation.

Over the full week, the Nasdaq Composite gained 1.6%, and the S&P 500 and the Dow each added 1%. It was the first week in four in which all three indexes closed higher. Each had fallen in the prior two weeks, and the Dow’s weekly gain ended a three-week losing streak. The weakness of mid-July is covered in the July 17 session recap, when all three indexes posted weekly losses.

The monthly results split. The Dow rose 0.3% for July, the S&P 500 slipped 0.1%, and the Nasdaq fell 3.2%. Year to date, all three were up between 9% and 10% at the end of the month.

The gap between the Dow and the Nasdaq follows from how the indexes are built. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite are weighted by market capitalization, so the largest companies, which are concentrated in technology and related sectors, have the largest influence on their returns. A month of pressure on technology and software shares therefore hits the Nasdaq hardest. The Dow holds 30 stocks and is price-weighted: a stock’s influence depends on its share price, not its company size, and a $1 move in any component moves the index by the same number of points. Its mix of industrials, financials, health care and consumer names gives it less exposure to the tech trade, which is why it could finish July higher while the Nasdaq dropped more than 3%. For a running view of the broad benchmark, the S&P 500 index page carries the price history and performance figures.

Before the Open: Dow Futures Pointed Higher

Futures for the Dow Jones were already up about 0.6% before Friday’s opening bell, extending a rebound that began in Thursday’s session, when the indexes bounced back sharply after the midweek decline. Stock index futures trade nearly around the clock on the CME, so they register overnight news, here a batch of after-hours earnings reports from Amazon, Apple and others, before the cash market opens at 9:30 a.m. ET. A positive futures reading signals the expected direction at the open, not the close, and Friday’s dip into negative territory after the opening bell shows how quickly that expectation can be revised during the session.

Amazon’s Cloud Results Lifted the Market

Amazon (AMZN) was the largest single driver of the day. The stock was up 11% in premarket trading after the company reported results Thursday evening, and it closed up nearly 16%, leading gains in the S&P 500, the Nasdaq and the Dow.

The quarter beat expectations by a wide margin. Amazon reported earnings of $5.75 per share against an analyst consensus of $1.99. Much of that gap came from Amazon’s investment in Anthropic, the artificial intelligence developer. When a company holds an equity stake in another business and the value of that stake rises, the gain can flow into net income even though it does not come from selling goods or services. That makes earnings per share a weaker gauge of operating performance in a quarter like this one, which is why the revenue figures carried more weight for investors.

Revenue was $200.6 billion, up 20% from a year earlier and above the $196.8 billion analysts had forecast. Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division, grew sales 37% to $42.2 billion, close to $2 billion above estimates. AWS growth matters beyond Amazon itself: companies building and running AI products rent computing capacity from cloud providers, so AWS revenue is read as a measure of corporate demand for AI infrastructure across the market.

Analysts responded with higher targets. JPMorgan raised its price target to $365 from $330, citing the strength of AWS revenue growth, and noted that Amazon executives described the return on their AI investments as “compelling,” with a “clear line-of-sight to strong financial returns.” William Blair analysts said AWS growth “continues to astound” and that they expect the segment to keep gaining momentum.

Sector Moves: Consumer Discretionary and Communication Services

Amazon’s surge carried its sector with it. The S&P 500 Consumer Discretionary sector rose more than 6% on the day. Many readers expect Amazon to sit in Information Technology, but under the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS) used for S&P 500 sectors, it is classified as Consumer Discretionary because its largest business is retail. Amazon is one of the heaviest weights in that sector, so a move of this size in one stock can produce a sector gain that would look extraordinary for a group of companies moving independently.

A similar classification matters for Alphabet (GOOGL) and Meta Platforms (META), which sit in the Communication Services sector rather than Information Technology. That sector rose 4.2%, led by a 6.5% gain in Alphabet. Meta finished more than 3% higher after falling 8% on Thursday.

Apple Fell on a Weaker Outlook

Apple (AAPL) moved the other way. The stock was down nearly 9% at one point and closed about 7% lower, the largest decliner in both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq on a day when the broader market rose. Apple is also a Dow component, so its drop partly offset Amazon’s gain in the blue-chip index.

The fiscal third-quarter report itself topped estimates for earnings and revenue, helped by strong iPhone sales. Two parts of the release weighed on the shares. Services revenue, which covers the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music and other subscriptions, came in below the analyst consensus. Services carry higher margins than hardware, so a shortfall there can matter more to the valuation than a hardware beat. The bigger problem was guidance: executives said on the earnings call that they expect revenue to grow 9% to 11% in the current quarter, below the 11.8% analysts were looking for.

Apple pointed to supply constraints tied to rising costs for memory components, which have already led it to raise prices on some products. Analysts at Jefferies added a demand concern: some consumers may have bought devices earlier than planned to get ahead of price increases, which could pull sales forward and leave the next couple of quarters weaker. Memory chip pricing is a supply chain issue for the whole hardware industry; one of the producers in that market is ChangXin Memory Technologies.

Investor attention now shifts to September, when CEO Tim Cook is set to hand the top job to John Ternus and Apple is expected to unveil its new iPhone lineup, which could include its first foldable model. Even after Friday’s decline, Apple shares were still up about 12% for the year, having reached a record high earlier the same week.

Microsoft After a Record One-Day Gain

Microsoft (MSFT) came into Friday after the largest single-day increase in market value ever recorded by a U.S. company. On Thursday, the stock jumped about 15.5% after earnings beat estimates and capital expenditures came in lighter than expected. That move added roughly $450 billion to Microsoft’s market capitalization.

The previous record belonged to Nvidia (NVDA), which gained 19%, or about $440 billion in market value, in April 2025, when President Donald Trump paused the sweeping tariffs he had announced days earlier. Nvidia’s percentage gain was larger, but Microsoft’s higher starting market value produced the bigger dollar figure. Market capitalization equals the share price multiplied by shares outstanding, so the dollar gain for a given percentage move scales with the size of the company. For example, a 15% rise for a company valued at $3 trillion adds $450 billion, while the same percentage for a $1 trillion company adds $150 billion.

The capital expenditure detail is notable because Microsoft’s spending came in below forecasts and investors rewarded it. Big-tech AI spending has been a recurring source of market pressure this summer; the July 16 session saw the Nasdaq drop on AI spending concerns. Microsoft traded slightly lower early Friday, then finished the day up about 3%.

The Fed, Warsh and the 10-Year Treasury Yield

The bond market was the other major thread of the week. The Federal Reserve held short-term interest rates steady at its meeting on Wednesday, and stocks sold off afterward. At his second press conference as Fed chair, Kevin Warsh said the central bank “remains resolute” and “will not waver” in bringing inflation back to its 2% target. The Fed did not raise rates, however, and did not signal that increases were imminent.

Bank of America analysts led by Aditya Bhave described the press conference as “all hat, no cattle.” In their view, bond traders are now testing the Fed’s resolve and could push Warsh toward raising rates at the next meeting. The core issue is that long-term yields reflect what investors expect inflation and policy rates to be over many years. If traders doubt that the Fed will act to contain inflation, they demand a higher yield to hold long-dated bonds, and long-term borrowing costs rise whether or not the Fed moves its own rate.

The 10-year Treasury yield rose during Friday’s session to its highest level since January 2025. That yield is a benchmark for many consumer and business loans, including 30-year fixed mortgages, so a rise translates into higher mortgage rates and other long-term borrowing costs. It also affects stock valuations: a higher risk-free yield lowers the present value of future corporate profits, which tends to hit companies whose value rests on earnings far in the future, such as high-growth technology and software names. For background on the inflation readings behind the Fed’s position, see the U.S. inflation rate by year.

Tariffs: A Third Attempt at a Broad Import Tax

New U.S. tariffs took effect the previous week, and their impact on markets and prices was small. They are the administration’s third attempt within a year at a broad tax on imports, and each earlier version ran into legal or statutory limits.

The first set, imposed under emergency economic powers, was struck down by the Supreme Court in February. The administration replaced it with a 10% global tariff that carried a 150-day limit; that duration matches Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, which allows temporary import surcharges for up to 150 days unless Congress extends them. Those duties lapsed on July 24, and the administration then imposed new tariffs of 10% or 12.5% under a different provision of trade law. The U.S. Trade Representative said the new duties penalize countries for not doing enough to stop trade in goods made with forced labor.

Legal challenges arrived immediately. A spice importer and a watch retailer filed a proposed class action in the U.S. Court of International Trade on the same day, seeking to void the duties and recover refunds with interest. Learning Resources, the family-owned toymaker that won the case against the emergency-powers tariffs at the Supreme Court, filed a separate suit.

The new broad tariffs sit on top of other duties: a 25% tariff recently imposed on Brazil and product-specific tariffs on goods such as steel and cars. Trump has also threatened a 50% tariff on Canadian products, which would not take effect until Aug. 19, leaving negotiators from both countries time to resolve the dispute. For importers, the practical questions are which rate applies to which goods and whether any refunds become available if the courts rule against the duties.

Earnings Disappointments: GoDaddy, Coinbase and Reddit

Three companies fell sharply on Friday even though at least part of their quarterly reports beat expectations. In each case, investors focused on the outlook or on a specific line of the business rather than the headline numbers.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy (GDDY) was the worst performer in the S&P 500 on Friday, falling about 15% a day after the website domain and hosting provider updated its full-year guidance. The company narrowed its fiscal 2026 revenue forecast to a range of $5.215 billion to $5.255 billion. The midpoint of that range, $5.235 billion, sits just below the analyst consensus of $5.24 billion. GoDaddy also reaffirmed a free cash flow target of about $1.8 billion, while analysts had expected $1.9 billion. Second-quarter results beat expectations, but the guidance mattered more for a stock that had already lost about a third of its value since the start of the year.

Coinbase

Coinbase Global (COIN), the largest publicly traded U.S. crypto exchange and an S&P 500 member, fell about 15% Friday afternoon, extending a recent slide. Second-quarter revenue of $1.22 billion, much of it tied to crypto trading volume, missed the $1.29 billion analysts expected. The company reported a net loss of $359.5 million, far wider than the $120.7 million loss analysts had forecast.

The results reflect a “crypto winter,” the term for a prolonged period of falling crypto prices and shrinking trading activity. Transaction revenue fell from the same quarter a year earlier, mainly because consumer crypto spot trading volume dropped 38%. Spot trading means buying and selling the coins themselves, as opposed to derivatives contracts based on their prices. Growth in Coinbase’s derivatives and prediction markets businesses, part of a broader push to diversify beyond crypto trading fees, offset some of the decline.

CEO Brian Armstrong said on the earnings call that the company’s revenue has “really decoupled from Bitcoin trading fees,” with about 88% of net revenue now coming from sources other than spot trading, and that this revenue is “more durable” than in previous cycles. “Coinbase is no longer a bet just on the price of Bitcoin,” he said. The stock’s performance cut against that argument on the day: through Thursday’s close, Coinbase shares had roughly tracked bitcoin’s 27% decline, and the post-earnings drop pushed the stock below that pace.

Reddit

Reddit beat analysts’ second-quarter estimates for both profit and revenue, and the stock still fell 22% on Friday. The company earned $1.25 per share on revenue of $804.9 million, up 61% from a year earlier; analysts had expected $0.97 per share and $732.4 million. Average daily active uniques, Reddit’s main user metric, rose 18% to 130.3 million, in line with expectations.

The selling followed a line in co-founder and CEO Steve Huffman’s letter to shareholders: “search referrals were choppy in the quarter, and traffic was more volatile later in the quarter.” Search referrals are visits that arrive from search engines, so variability there exposes Reddit’s traffic, and the advertising revenue built on it, to changes outside the company’s control. Huffman acknowledged that “our visibility in referral traffic remains low,” while adding that Reddit is “building a daily destination” rather than relying on “drive-by traffic.” The shares had lost about 40% of their value since the start of the year before Friday’s drop.

Novo Nordisk’s Heart Drug Trial Missed

Novo Nordisk’s (NVO) U.S.-listed shares fell about 11% in premarket trading after the Danish drugmaker said its heart drug ziltivekimab failed to meet expectations in a Phase 3 trial. Before Friday, those shares were up just 1% for the year.

Phase 3 is the large, late-stage clinical trial designed to show whether a drug works on the outcomes that matter to patients and regulators. According to the company, ziltivekimab did what it was designed to do biologically: it engaged its target and inhibited the IL-6 inflammation pathway, which showed up as expected reductions in free IL-6 and in high-sensitivity C-reactive protein (hsCRP), a blood marker of inflammation. Those changes did not reduce major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) compared with placebo in patients with atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, chronic kidney disease and inflammation. MACE is the composite endpoint used in heart trials, covering outcomes such as heart attack, stroke and cardiovascular death. A drug that moves a biomarker without reducing those events has not shown a clinical benefit.

Novo Nordisk, best known for the weight-loss and diabetes drugs Wegovy and Ozempic, said the result will not change its 2026 adjusted operating profit outlook, but it will record a non-cash impairment charge in the third quarter of 2026. An impairment writes down the value the company carried for the program on its balance sheet. It reduces reported earnings without any cash leaving the business, which is consistent with an unchanged adjusted profit outlook, since adjusted measures typically exclude such charges.

Upcoming: Palantir’s Earnings and the Expected Move

Palantir (PLTR) was scheduled to report earnings after the close on Monday, and options prices pointed to a large move. Based on options pricing late in the week, traders expected the shares to move as much as 10% in either direction by the end of the week following the report.

That expected move comes from the options market, not an analyst forecast. A common approximation divides the price of an at-the-money straddle (a call and a put at the same strike, expiring after the event) by the stock price. The result is the size of the move, up or down, that the options are pricing in. It does not indicate direction, and the actual move can be smaller or larger. Applied to Palantir’s level of roughly $120 on Friday morning, a 10% move would put the shares near $132 on the upside or about $108 on the downside. Those figures are approximate and assume the starting price holds until the report.

Palantir shares had lost nearly a third of their value since the start of the year. Solid earnings had not been enough to reverse the decline during a broader pullback in software stocks. Analysts at Citi wrote ahead of the report that the slide could offer investors a buying opportunity and said they expected strong results from Palantir’s commercial business. The Aug. 4 session recap covers the market’s next sessions.

Tesla and SpaceX: Merger Speculation and a Denial

Tesla (TSLA) and SpaceX (SPCX) both traded lower early Friday after a Wall Street Journal report that Elon Musk had told Tesla executives to prepare to separate the company’s Chinese business from its U.S. operations, a step toward a possible merger with SpaceX. Spinning off, selling or closing the China business could remove an obstacle to combining Tesla with SpaceX, a major U.S. military contractor, at a time of rising geopolitical tension between the United States and China.

Musk rejected the report on X, writing that separating Tesla’s businesses had “never even come up in a discussion ever” and calling the story “absurdly fake news.” Speculation about a combination has circulated since SpaceX’s IPO in June. One technology analyst said recently that SpaceX shareholders are going to end up owning Tesla eventually, “if you like it or not.” The question also came up on Tesla’s earnings call the previous week. Musk said he could not discuss combining companies on an earnings call, but he listed areas where the two already work together, including the Terafab chip manufacturing plant and Starlink integration with Cybercabs.

Both stocks had been under pressure. SpaceX closed Thursday at its lowest level since going public, about 50% below its all-time high, and Tesla had lost about a third of its value since the start of the year.

Commodities, Bitcoin and the Dollar

Oil prices rose Friday as traders weighed developments in the Middle East. U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate futures rose 1.4% to $84.80 a barrel during the session, and global benchmark Brent crude rose 1.2% to above $90. Both still finished the week lower, with WTI down about 5% and Brent down about 9%. The earlier part of that decline is covered in the July 27 recap, when oil prices plunged.

Gold futures fell 1.3% to $4,105 an ounce. The U.S. dollar index, which measures the dollar against a basket of major foreign currencies, edged up to 99.93. A firmer dollar and higher Treasury yields both tend to work against gold, which pays no interest and is priced in dollars. Bitcoin traded around $62,900 during the day, down from an overnight high near $65,300, a decline consistent with the weakness in crypto trading activity reflected in Coinbase’s results.

What the Session Showed

July 31 was a day of large single-stock moves that netted out to moderate index gains. Amazon’s AWS results and the rebound in Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta outweighed Apple’s guidance-driven decline, which is why the cap-weighted indexes, and the Nasdaq most of all, finished higher. Several of the day’s sharpest drops, at Reddit, GoDaddy and Apple, came from companies that beat at least some quarterly estimates but disappointed on outlook or on one specific metric. Behind the stock moves, the bond market was signaling doubt about the Fed’s inflation stance through rising long-term yields, which raises borrowing costs for households and businesses regardless of what happens at the next Fed meeting.