Good Not Great Mag 7 Earnings May Not Be Enough To Sustain Market Rally

Wednesday night I suggested that 5,650 might be the limit for the S&P if the recent bounce is in fact a bear market rally. And that’s exactly how things played out in Thursday’s session with the S&P reaching a high of 5,659 and closing at 5,604 ahead of Apple (AAPL) and Amazon (AMZN) earnings.

After the close, both reports failed to impress. AAPL continues to struggle with a lack of growth. iPhone sales were up only 1.9% year over year. The only real growth is in the Services segment where revenue was +11.6%. Overall revenue growth was only 5.1%. Net Income was only +4.8% as well. These are the numbers of a mature company past its growth phase and I continue to believe that it’s only a matter of time before AAPL’s multiple gets rerated from ~30x to ~20x. AAPL shares finished the after hours -3.78%.

AMZN reported a “good not great” quarter similar to Google’s. Overall Revenue growth of 8.6% and AWS revenue growth of 16.9% is solid. AMZN continues to increase its profitability with Operating Margin increasing to 11.8% resulting in a 62% increase in EPS to $1.59. AMZN shares finished the after hours -3.21%.

While the Futures are up for some reason, AAPL and AMZN represent $5 trillion in market cap seemingly headed in the opposite direction tomorrow morning. Given the reasons to think 5,650 represents strong resistance as well as the less than overwhelming earnings from AAPL and AMZN after the close, I’d expect the market to correct Friday barring something out of the ordinary from the April Jobs Report.