The Rundown - Apple Posts Best Sales Growth Since 2021, Amazon's Cloud Business Lags

Episode Date: August 1, 2025

Stock market update for August 1, 2025. This video is for informational purposes only and reflects the views of the host and guest, not Public Holdings or its subsidiaries. Mentions of assets are not recommendations. Investing involves risk, including loss. Past performance does not guarantee future results. For full disclosures, visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Public.com/disclosures⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠.

Public.com presents the rundown. Your daily market update in under 10 minutes. My name is Zadmani, and today is Friday, August 1st. In today's episode, we'll tell you about the flurry of tariff changes that are going into effect and the latest jobs report that's shaking the markets right now. We'll also recap earnings from Apple and talk about the Figma IPO. Then stick around to the end of the show to find out why Ray Dalio is stepping away from is Hedge Fund. We get a great show for you today. Let's go. Stocks continue to slide on Thursday

with the S&P 500 dropping for the third day in a row, closing down 0.4%. And the NASDAQ basically went nowhere down 0.03%. Yesterday was another wild day of trading where earlier in the day, the S&P and NASDAQ were at record highs thanks to a massive surge in Microsoft and meta stock after their earnings on Wednesday night. But that wasn't enough to keep the market rally going. It seems like investors might be getting nervous again about tariffs and inflation. We got the PCE inflation report yesterday, which is the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge.

That came in at 2.6%, which was higher than expected. In fact, that was the highest rate recorded since February, and it could be a sign that tariffs are starting to push up prices. And speaking of tariffs, we got a major development on that front last night. President Trump signed an executive order to set new tariff rates for over 80 countries, with rates ranging from 15 to 40%. And the country's not named in that executive order will pay a 10% baseline tariff. These new rates kick in after midnight on August 7th to allow U.S. customs to make the necessary changes to collect the levies.

Now, if that wasn't enough information for investors to chew on, we also got hit with a July jobs report this morning, and it wasn't so hot. According to the reports, only 73,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy in July, which was less than the 100,000 jobs that was expected. And to make matters worse, job growth for the month of May and June were revised way down. With the latest data saying that a combined 258,000 fewer jobs were added in May and June than previously estimated. So that's not a great sign. We got hit with a double whammy where inflation is showing signs of heating up and job growth is showing signs of slings.

flowing down. So it'll be interesting to see how the markets react to that. I'm looking at the pre-market right now and it is red across the board. The markets might be in for a bumpy ride in August. Let's run through some headlines. Starting with Apple's earnings. Apple delivered a surprisingly strong quarter with revenues jumping nearly 10% to $94 billion in Q2. That's the fastest revenue growth that Apple has seen in three years. And Apple also did more than $23 billion. dollars in profit. Now, the two key drivers of growth for Apple last quarter were iPhones and China. iPhone revenues were up 13% in the quarter and a reason for that might be because of tariffs. People were rushing to buy iPhones because of concerns that tariffs could potentially drive up

prices. Now, Apple hasn't raised prices on their products yet because of tariffs, but tariffs did cost the company $800 million in Q2 and Apple was expected to pay around $1.1 billion in tariffs in the current quarter. Now, as for China, that was another bright spot. Apple saw sales grow 4% in Q2, which was a nice comeback after seeing back-to-back quarters of sales decline. Tim Cook said that the MacBook Air is the best-selling laptop in China and that the Mac Mini is the best-selling desktop. In fact, Apple's Mac division overall was their best performing with revenues up 15% to $8 billion. I definitely contributed to that. I bought an M4 MacBook Air and a Mac Mini last quarter. So, You're welcome, Tim Cook.

Now, looking beyond just Apple's products, Apple's services business continues to put up solid growth with revenues up 13% to $27 billion. This is all the money that Apple makes from the App Store and ICloud storage fees that I'm probably going to be paying for the rest of my life so I don't lose my pictures. And this is becoming a big part of Apple's business. Overall, I've got to say solid quarter for Apple, it seems like despite all the concerns about Apple's AI strategy, their core business of selling products is still doing well, and they're finding some success in China again.

And that was enough for investors to breathe a sigh of relief with Apple stock up nearly 2% this morning. That's not quite the pop that Microsoft and Meta got when they reported earnings. But at this point, I'm just happy that Apple didn't disappoint. It's funny how low the bar is set for Apple these days. Now, there are still concerns about Apple's lack of AI development. Tim Cook tried to reassure investors on the earnings call saying that Apple will continue to make significant investments in AI, and they're even open to M&A to accelerate that roadmap.

There's been rumors about Apple potentially buying an up-and-coming AI startup like perplexity, but nothing has been finalized yet. But the fact that Tim Cook is saying that M&A is on the table, I think they can make a big splash this year. Now let's get into Amazon's earnings, they reported last night. And investors are raising red flags, especially when it comes to their cloud business. Amazon did beat Wall Street expectations for both revenue and profits in Q2. Sales were up 13% to over $167 billion, which is pretty solid.

But the markets didn't care about that. The stock is actually down nearly 7% because the company gave a weaker than expected profit forecast for Q3 with concerns around slowdown in AWS. Amazon's cloud business, AWS, saw revenue growth of 17% to $31 billion in Q2, which sounds pretty good until you realize that Microsoft's Azure just posted a 39% growth and Google's cloud was up 32%. So it could be a sign that Amazon's falling behind in the AI cloud race to their competitors

and investors are noticing. See, while AWS doesn't make up the majority of revenue for Amazon, it's still the profit engine for the company, accounting for more than 60% of Amazon's operating income. So when growth starts to slow down there, it's kind of a big deal. Now, outside of cloud, Amazon's e-commerce and advertising business are still strong. Retail sales and Prime Day were solid, and ad revenue is still growing nicely. But none of that was really enough to offset the concerns around AWS and profits moving forward.

Now, I do want to talk about the Figma IPO real quick, because oh my god did things get crazy yesterday. The design software company officially IPOed yesterday afternoon at $33 a share, and the stock immediately skyrocketed to over $100, finished in the day up 250%. That's one of the biggest one-day IPO pops ever, according to Bloomberg. And the stock is up another 20% this morning at the time of this recording. You know, I was pretty bullish on Figma going into their IPO,

but I didn't expect it to go crazy like this. It sort of became a meme stock, honestly. And that makes the question, why was the IPO price so low given the crazy demand? By pricing it so low, Figma left billions of dollars on the table. We might have to do a follow-up deep dive episode about that because it's very interesting on how the IPO process works. The biggest winners end up being the institutional investors. Let's talk about some stocks making moves today. Reddit shares are ripping this morning after the company crushed earnings estimates for the quarter.

Revenue grew by 78% in Q2, and daily active Reddit users jumped by 21% to over 110 million. Now, the growth story for Reddit has been AI. Reddit's been licensing its data to companies like OpenAI and Google to train their AI models, but now they're also going direct to consumer with their own AI tool called Reddit Answers, which they launched at the end of 2024. Reddit's AI Answers tool now has over 6 million weekly users, which is up from the $1 million last quarter. So they saw a 6x growth over the last few months.

So yeah, investors were loving this, and shares of Reddit are up more than 14% this morning on this news. Now, on the flip side, shares of Moderna are slipping after the company cut its full-year revenue outlook by $300 million thanks to a delayed shipment of its COVID booster vaccines to the UK. Instead of being shipped by the end of 2025, those boosters will now arrive in Q1 of 2026. And the timing of all this isn't great.

Moderna already announced a 10% staff cut earlier this week and the company is still losing money. They did beat earnings estimates for a Q2, but that wasn't enough to calm investors. And shares are down more than 4% this morning on this news. Not exactly the shot in the arm they were hoping for, huh? Let's wrap the show with a fun fact. Ray Dalio, the hedge fund billionaire who founded Bridgewater 50 years ago and grew it to be the largest hedge fund in the world at one point. has officially exited the firm after selling his final shares and leaving the board. Bridgewater is unique in many ways, but specifically for their intense culture and what Ray

Dahliae calls radical transparency. I mean, the employees at Bridgewater would rate each other on strengths and weaknesses using baseball cards. Again, it was pretty intense and there's a lot written about it. You can get away with that stuff when you're doing great, but lately Bridgewater's performance hasn't been so good in the past few years. In fact, Ray Dallio started his exit transition back in 2022. I guess he can now focus all his time on being a finance influencer. I'm not joking, by the way. This dude is cranking out a ton of content. I see a Ray Dalio posted my LinkedIn feed like almost every day. Well, all right, guys, that's the rundown for today. That's the rundown for this week. We had one of the most action-packed wild weeks of the year,

and we're finally through it. Thank you to everyone that tuned into all the episodes this week. You know, we've been putting a lot of efforts into these shows in the back end to try to make the most informative as possible. So hopefully you guys have been enjoying that. Thank you, so much for listening and watching shout out to mike and connor for all the help behind the scenes and we'll see you guys back here this weekend for the deep dive