US stocks rose Friday to finish a wild July for Wall Street as Amazon leaped, Apple sank, and rising oil prices worsened worries about inflation staying high. Friday's gains sent the S&P 500 to its first winning week in three, the AP reports, but the main measure of the US stock market nevertheless finished the month with a tiny loss.
- The Dow rose 276.97 points, or 0.5%, to 52,485.03, ending the week up 1%.
- The S&P 500 rose 52.09 points, or 0.7%, to 7,489.72, up 1% for the week.
- The Nasdaq composite rose 251.68 points, or 1%, to 25,373.85, up 1.6% for the week.
It's a fitting finish to July for the US stock market, which lurched up and down as oil prices shot higher because of the Iran war and worries grew about whether Big Tech's massive investments in artificial intelligence technology will translate into profits and whether chipmaker stocks soared too high in the euphoria around AI. Amazon led the market with a leap of 15.3% after reporting much stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its profit more than tripled from a year earlier, thanks in part to an acceleration of growth in its cloud computing business. Analysts said that could be a sign Amazon's huge AI investments are paying off, and Amazon increased its forecast for how much it will spend on investments this year.
More firmly on the losing end of Wall Street was Apple, which dropped 7.4% despite reporting stronger profit for the latest quarter than expected. Its forecast for revenue growth in the current quarter fell short of expectations, which executives pinned on a supply crunch in components getting vacuumed up in the AI boom. The gains came despite another rise in oil prices. The price for a barrel of Brent crude rose 1.2% to settle at $87.93 after careening between $72 and $102 earlier in July.
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
