The Big Picture
The biggest technology companies reported this week, and the market did not like what it heard. Alphabet had its worst day since it went public in 2004 after its spending on artificial intelligence (AI) pushed quarterly profit well below forecasts. Amazon fell after a narrow miss and a record cash outflow. Then, on Friday, Intel fell 28.6%, its steepest one-day drop since 1974, on a forecast that showed AI demand for memory chips squeezing the rest of its business. The S&P 500 finished the week down 0.6% at 7,580.07, its third weekly loss in a row, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite lost 2.0% to 25,437.00.
Yet most stocks rose. Nine of the eleven S&P 500 sectors gained, health care closed at a record on Thursday, and the Russell 2000 (an index of 2,000 smaller US companies) rose 1.3% to 2,811.84. The equal-weight S&P 500, which gives every company the same weight instead of weighting by size, rose 0.8%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.9% to 51,770.31, ending a three-week winning run. The VIX (the CBOE Volatility Index, a gauge of how much turbulence the market expects over the next 30 days) finished at 19.42, almost exactly where it began the week, but only after falling to 16.91 on Wednesday and jumping 13% on Friday.