Nine points and sixty-four cents
S&P 500 7,489.72 · +52.09 · +0.70%
The S&P 500 closed June at 7,499.36 and closed July at 7,489.72. The month cost it nine points and sixty-four cents, which is thirteen hundredths of one percent. Inside that: Microsoft gained 24.58 percent and Sandisk lost 46.57. Intel lost 35.40, Marvell 37.04, Applied Materials 29.78, Micron 28.70, Tesla 26.01, Caterpillar 23.48, the semiconductor ETF 21.20 — against Intercontinental Exchange up 23.86, Amazon 13.95, energy 12.13, the banks 6.21. Seventy-one points of spread between the best name and the worst, and the index moved nine. The last session made the argument one final time in miniature: Amazon rose 15.32 percent and Apple fell 7.35, on the two heaviest volumes of the day; the semiconductor ETF opened four and a half percent up, reached 532.67, and closed at 504.89 — thirty-six cents above where it started. The S&P 500 recorded four new highs and four new lows. By the count of the wire it was the index's first losing July since 2014.
The day's protagonist
Amazon AMZN
Move: +15.32% to 271.58 — while Apple fell 7.35% in the same session, on the two heaviest volumes of the day
Amazon opened at 265.00, twenty-nine dollars and fifty cents above Thursday's close, made 273.23, and finished at 271.58 — up 15.32 percent on 129.1 million shares. Apple opened at 304.81, having closed at 333.43, and finished at 308.91 — down 7.35 percent on 132.5 million shares. Those were the two busiest stocks of the session and they moved twenty-three percentage points apart, in opposite directions, in the same six and a half hours, in the same index, on the same day, for the same reason: both had reported, and the market had decided one of them was paying for the future and the other was not. If you owned both, your afternoon was almost exactly uneventful. That sentence is the month. It is also, precisely, why the July close is 7,489.72 rather than something interesting. Amazon ended July up 13.95 percent and Apple up 6.76; over the month they agreed. On the last afternoon they disagreed violently and cancelled, which is what everything in this archive's July did, in every possible combination, twenty-two times.
The deeper account
The last day of the month was itself a round trip, which the archive did not arrange and could not have improved on. It opened at 7,462.13 and touched 7,489.52 inside the first ten minutes. It then fell eighty-nine points and sixty-nine cents to its low of 7,399.83 by ten past ten. It spent the following five and a half hours climbing, reached 7,512.04 in the final ten-minute bar, and settled at 7,489.72 — twenty cents above where it had been at twenty to ten in the morning. A month that returned to its start, on a day that returned to its start, in a session whose last hour returned to its first.
The month table is the only ledger July deserves and it is above. Microsoft up 24.58 percent and Sandisk down 46.57 is a spread of seventy-one points between two companies in the same index over twenty-two sessions, and the index moved nine points and sixty-four cents. Intel lost more than a third of itself. Marvell lost more than a third of itself. Caterpillar, a machinery company, lost 23.48 percent — a worse month than Tesla's and far worse than the Nasdaq's — because it had quietly become an artificial-intelligence stock and got repriced as one. Meanwhile Nvidia finished the month up 0.33 percent and Alphabet down 0.35, having taken enormously different routes to the same nowhere.
Two numbers from the final session say it better than any summary. The first is that the S&P 500 recorded four new fifty-two-week highs and four new fifty-two-week lows on the same day. The second is the semiconductor ETF, which opened at 527.10 — four and a half percent above the previous close, after the best day of its summer — ran to 532.67, and finished at 504.89, thirty-six cents up on the session. It gave back the entire gap between the open and four o'clock and ended the day, and very nearly the month, exactly where it had been.
By the count of the wire this was the index's first losing July since 2014. This archive verified the nine points and sixty-four cents itself and takes the twelve-year streak from the press, because its own monthly series cannot prove it. What it can say without any help is the thing this batch was built to say: an index is an average, and an average is a machine for destroying information. Underneath a number that did not move, the market spent July having one of the largest internal arguments of the year — about whether the money being spent on the future would ever come back, and about who would get to keep it. Nine of those twenty-two afternoons are now in the encyclopedia. The other thirteen went the same way, and the mark on the doorframe is at the same height.
The artifact
The ledger — what actually happened
| Measure | Close | Change | Marginalia |
|---|---|---|---|
| S&P 500 | 7,489.72 | +52.09 · +0.70% | opened 7,462.13 and spiked to 7,489.52 inside the first ten minutes; fell 89.69 points to its low of 7,399.83 by 10:10; climbed all day to 7,512.04 in the final bar — and closed twenty cents above where it had been in the first ten minutes of the session |
| July 2026 | 7,489.72 | −9.64 | from 7,499.36 at the end of June — a fall of 0.13 percent, and by the count of the wire the index's first losing July since 2014. The Nasdaq Composite fell 3.2 percent in the month and the Dow rose 0.3 |
| The month's best | MSFT +24.58% | Intercontinental Exchange +23.86%, Amazon +13.95%, energy +12.13%, Apple +6.76%, financials +6.21%. Nvidia finished July up 0.33 percent and Alphabet down 0.35 — the two biggest names in the argument also went nowhere | |
| The month's worst | SNDK −46.57% | Marvell −37.04%, Intel −35.40%, Applied Materials −29.78%, Micron −28.70%, Tesla −26.01%, Caterpillar −23.48%, AppLovin −23.16%, the semiconductor ETF −21.20%, technology −7.96%. Seventy-one points of spread from the best name to the worst | |
| Amazon | 271.58 | +15.32% | on 129.1 million shares; opened 265.00. Apple −7.35% to 308.91 on 132.5 million shares, opening at 304.81 — the two heaviest names of the session, twenty-three points apart |
| Semiconductors | +0.07% | the SOXX ETF opened at 527.10 — four and a half percent above Thursday's close — reached 532.67, and closed at 504.89, thirty-six cents higher on the day. Micron gave back 5.90% of Thursday's 18.36% | |
| New highs and lows | 4 and 4 | on the S&P 500, on the last day of the month — the month's own summary, printed by accident. The Nasdaq recorded 52 highs against 131 lows. Volume 20.6 billion shares against a twenty-session average of 17.1 billion, the heaviest session of these nine | |
| VIX | 15.99 | −6.44% | sixteen sessions after closing at 15.03 on the day of the high, and two after 20.66 on the day of the decision. Consumer sentiment finished the month at 55.2 and the Chicago PMI at 57.6, both above estimate |
Sources
- Robinhood market-data feed — SPX 10-minute bars and day bar; SPX day bars for 30 June and 31 July, from which the monthly change of −9.64 points is computed; VIX day bar; day bars with adjustment none for every name in the month table (MSFT, ICE, AMZN, AAPL, NVDA, GOOGL, META, WDC, AMD, SOXX, APP, CAT, TSLA, MU, AMAT, INTC, MRVL, SNDK, ETN) and the ten sector SPDRs. All percentages on this page are computed from those closes. Pulled 2026-08-28
- Zacks via Yahoo Finance — "Stock Market News for Aug 3, 2026" (covers the 31 July session: index closes, Amazon, Eaton, the VIX, volume, new highs and lows, the July monthly figures, and the final consumer sentiment and Chicago PMI readings) — https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/stock-market-news-aug-3-124000595.html
- Yahoo Finance — "S&P 500 ends with its first July decline since 2014. Here are the stocks that led the selloff." (the source of the twelve-year streak, which this archive attributes rather than computes) — https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/p-500-ends-first-july-211000746.html