Each indexed to 100 at the July 20 close. The sharp drop in Alphabet and Tesla comes at the right edge, after they reported past Wednesday's 4pm close; IBM, already crashed, drifted lower into its own call.
Alphabet fell about 4% and Tesla about 3% in initial after-hours trading despite each beating on revenue, while IBM cut its full-year revenue outlook, reaffirmed free cash flow, and drifted to a fresh post-crash low, all on a day the S&P 500 closed down 0.14%.
Each indexed to 100 at the July 20 close. The sharp drop in Alphabet and Tesla comes at the right edge, after they reported past Wednesday's 4pm close; IBM, already crashed, drifted lower into its own call.
7,498.96 is where the S&P 500 finished Wednesday, down 0.14%, a close that read like nothing happened. What happened, happened after the bell. Alphabet, Tesla, and IBM all reported inside the same hour, and the two that beat on revenue were the two the market sold.
0.92% is how much the Russell 2000 fell, the weakest of the major gauges, on a defensive session that spent the day waiting. The Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.57% to 25,690.90 and the Dow was unchanged at 52,218.58. Money leaned out of small caps and growth and into oil and gold ahead of the prints, and then the prints did the work.
205.77 is where IBM closed Wednesday, down 2.2%, a fresh low since the warning that erased a quarter of its value eight days earlier. The stock had already fallen 25.2% on July 14, when unscheduled preliminary results showed second-quarter revenue near 17.2 billion dollars against a Street estimate closer to 17.9 billion, with full guidance held back for this call. It opened Wednesday at 207.68, popped to 212.34 in the first fifteen minutes, then faded all day to close near its low.
IBM peaked above 300 in early July, lost a quarter of its value in a single session on July 14, then bled lower into Wednesday's call, closing at a fresh low near 206.
17.2 billion dollars is what IBM confirmed for the quarter after Wednesday's close, revenue up 1%, with operating earnings of 2.93 dollars a share. The company cut its full-year revenue-growth outlook to a range of 4 to 5% in constant currency, down from a prior target above 5%, and held its forecast for free cash flow to rise about 1 billion dollars this year. Chief Financial Officer James Kavanaugh cited "revenue headwinds late in the second quarter"; Chief Executive Arvind Krishna framed the June deal slippage as deferral rather than lost business, saying about a third of the delayed deals had already closed early in the third quarter.
Flat is where IBM traded in the eighty minutes of after-hours dealing that followed. It rose 2 to 3% on the reaffirmed cash line, then gave it back as the call wore on, ending the evening a hair below its 4pm price. The crash had done the repricing; the call itself moved almost nothing.
119.8 billion dollars is what Alphabet reported after the close, revenue up 24% and past estimates, with Google Cloud up 82%. The stock fell about 4% in initial after-hours trading. Capital spending reached 44.9 billion dollars for the quarter, and the company halted the share repurchases that a year earlier ran at 15.1 billion, steering the cash toward its computing build-out instead.
9.11 dollars a share was Alphabet's headline profit, a number flattered by a one-time gain on its stake in the AI developer Anthropic; stripped out, the operating result landed near the 2.88 dollars analysts expected. The revenue beat was real. It was not what the after-hours tape traded on.
28.24 billion dollars is what Tesla reported after the close, revenue up 26% and past estimates, on a record 480,126 deliveries. The stock fell about 3% in initial after-hours trading. Automotive margins narrowed, capital spending more than doubled from a year earlier, and free cash flow turned negative near 1.1 billion dollars, Tesla's first cash-burn quarter since 2024.
The two names with more than 20% revenue growth were the two the market sold after the bell. IBM, whose revenue barely grew, barely moved.
Two revenue beats, two selloffs, and one revenue cut that barely moved. IBM lowered its top line and held its cash-flow forecast, and the stock finished the call flat. Alphabet and Tesla each grew revenue more than 20%, and each was sold on what the growth cost: Alphabet's capital budget and suspended buyback, Tesla's return to cash burn. On Wednesday the market stopped paying for revenue and started pricing the cash left after the spending.
2.3% is how much West Texas crude rose, to 86.83, with gold up 1.9% to 4,147, both bid on Gulf supply risk through the overnight and into the morning. A market pricing the Federal Reserve to hold rates at its July 29 meeting eased to 78% from 84% a day earlier, and the 10-year Treasury yield rose about 3 basis points to 4.66%, with the two-year up more, a front-loaded move that tracked the oil bid. Overnight in Asia, a chip rally built on the prior day's US memory surge had already faded by the Seoul close, with Korea's Kospi giving back a 6% intraday gain to finish up less than 1%.