(Updates with index/price moves, macroeconomic data, and company/geopolitical news from the first paragraph.)
US equity indexes traded higher as market heavyweights Amazon.com (AMZN) and Apple (AAPL) diverged after reporting quarterly results and as the 10-year government bond yield soared to the highest level in a year amid crude oil gains.
The Nasdaq Composite rose 0.5% to 25,257.5 after midday Friday. The S&P 500 climbed 0.4% to 7,468.1, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average advanced 0.4% to 52,439.7. Both the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq traded lower earlier in the session.
Amazon's web services cloud-computing unit reported overnight the fastest sales growth in 18 quarters, helping the e-commerce giant handily exceed market expectations for Q2 earnings and revenue. Shares soared 14%, the top gainer on the S&P 500, the Nasdaq, and the Dow, even as the retailer expanded its full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance by about $20 billion to $220 billion.
Apple, meanwhile, plunged 14%, among the worst performers on the S&P 500, the Nasdaq, and the Dow. The company missed market estimates for iPad and services revenue overnight in fiscal Q3, after recently raising prices for MacBooks and iPads amid surging memory and storage chip costs.
In geopolitical news, Iran said Friday that it had targeted US military assets at Kuwait's Ahmad Al-Jaber airbase, describing the attack as retaliation for US strikes a day earlier, Al Jazeera, a Middle East broadcaster, reported Friday. The US has not responded to Iran's attack yet, and specific details about the damage and casualties are not known, the news report said.
The front-month US West Texas Intermediate crude oil jumped 2.1% to $85.38 a barrel, and global benchmark North Sea Brent advanced 1.4% to $90.26 a barrel, as no end is in sight for the Iran war.
In economic news, a survey conducted by the University of Michigan showed respondents expect a 4.2% inflation rate over the next year, down from 4.6% in June, and 3.3% annual inflation over the next five years, in line with a month ago. The Federal Reserve has remained above its 2% inflation target for more than five years.
"Let me reiterate. There is no soft inflation target. There is no soft implicit target. Not on this committee's watch. There's only a target, and it's 2%," Fed Chair Kevin Warsh said in a press briefing after the central bank overcame dissent from three policy makers to leave interest rates unchanged on Wednesday.
US Treasury yields surged, with the 10-year trading up 7.2 basis points to 4.74% after touching its 52-week high intraday. The two-year yield soared 6.4 basis points to 4.29%.
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