AAA Companies- a wild week on Wall Street

This week was completely loaded with earnings reports from some of the biggest tech companies in the world — and it was a crazy week of swings for most of the companies that reported.

Apple: Down 11% after a complete whiff on earnings and posting its first sales decline in 13 years, along with its biggest activist investor dumping his stake in the company.

First, Twitter’s loss is basically Facebook’s gain. Any concerns that there would be softness in the advertising market after Twitter said brand marketers did not increase spend as quickly as expected in the first quarter were probably thrown out the window following Facebook’s blockbuster earnings. Twitter reversed its user number decline by adding a few more million users than expected, but its revenue is not growing as quickly as expected — so the stock got hammered, while Facebook soared.

Second, and more importantly, is that Apple’s growth engine has slowed down. The company said it sold 51.2 million iPhones this quarter, compared to 61.2 million iPhones in the last quarter. Apple has become a bellwether for the tech industry — if it’s down, something must clearly be wrong — but this time around it’s Apple’s woes that caused Wall Street to erase tens of billions of dollars in value from the company.

There’s a running theme here: growth is being heavily rewarded — and lack of growth, punished — by Wall Street. And that’s especially true when it comes to more mature companies. While Facebook handily beat expectations on earnings and revenue, it also showed that the company still continues to grow at a healthy clip in terms of both generating cash and adding new users. Looking back at Apple, it’s clear that the company isn’t growing. It’s, in fact, declining.

Curated from Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and every other letter had a wild week on Wall Street | TechCrunch