A handful of very large companies drive a big share of what the U.S. stock market does in any given week. We follow four of them every Friday: Apple, Microsoft, NVIDIA, and Tesla. The scorecard below is built from every weekly analysis we have published, and the sections after it cover what moves each stock and how to read a week of trading.
Recent Readings
- Latest week (October 9, 2026): Apple +0.88%, Microsoft +3.39%, NVIDIA -2.00%, Tesla +3.27%, against +1.16% for SPY.
- Beat SPY that week: 2 of 4.
- Coverage: 15 weekly readings from June 19, 2026 to October 9, 2026.
Scorecard
Across the weeks in our archive, this is how each stock has done against SPY. The third column counts the weeks in which the stock had the best return of the four. Only weeks with a full set of weekly figures are counted.
| Stock | Weeks beating SPY | Weeks as top of the four | Best week | Worst week |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apple (AAPL) | 7 of 13 | 4 | +12.17% (Jul 2) | -7.24% (Jul 31) |
| Microsoft (MSFT) | 7 of 13 | 3 | +21.75% (Jul 31) | -3.08% (Jul 24) |
| NVIDIA (NVDA) | 7 of 13 | 4 | +11.56% (Aug 7) | -4.64% (Aug 21) |
| Tesla (TSLA) | 6 of 13 | 2 | +6.02% (Aug 21) | -17.81% (Jul 24) |
Why These Four
Apple, Microsoft, and NVIDIA have each been valued at more than $3 trillion at points in recent years, and each has taken a turn as the world’s largest listed company. Tesla is smaller but trades far more actively for its size. In recent years the four together have made up roughly a fifth of the S&P 500 and close to a third of the Nasdaq-100, so a bad week for them is hard for either index to hide.
They are not the only giants. Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, and Broadcom are comparable in size. We keep the list at four so the weekly tables stay readable, and because these four cover distinct businesses: consumer hardware, business software and cloud computing, AI chips, and electric vehicles.
What Moves Each Stock
Over long stretches Apple and Microsoft have been the steadier pair and NVIDIA and Tesla the more volatile, but an earnings week can jolt any of them, as the best and worst weeks in the scorecard show. Each responds to a different set of news.
Apple
The iPhone still brings in about half of Apple’s revenue, so the market watches upgrade cycles, the September product launch, and demand in China. The services business, which includes the App Store, iCloud, and payments, grows more steadily and carries higher margins, and it has become a larger part of how investors value the company. Apple also spends more on buying back its own shares than almost any other company, which has steadily reduced its share count.
Microsoft
Investors focus on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud platform, and the growth rate it reports each quarter. Office, Windows, and other business software provide a large recurring base. More recently the stock has traded on how much Microsoft spends on AI data centers and how quickly that spending turns into revenue.
NVIDIA
Data-center chips used to train and run AI models now account for the large majority of NVIDIA’s sales. Its results depend on how much the largest cloud companies, Microsoft among them, plan to spend on computing capacity, and on U.S. export rules for advanced chips. That makes NVIDIA a proxy for AI sentiment in general. Few large stocks have moved as far: its share price rose more than 800% between the end of 2022 and the end of 2024 as AI spending took off.
Tesla
Tesla reports vehicle deliveries in the first few days of January, April, July, and October, weeks before its full earnings, and those numbers move the stock on their own. Much of its valuation rests on expectations for self-driving software, robotaxis, and energy storage rather than on current car sales, so headlines about those projects matter more for Tesla than for the other three.
Share Price Versus Company Size
NVIDIA trades at a lower price per share than Apple or Microsoft even though it has at times been the most valuable of the three. The main reason is that it split each share into ten in June 2024, after a four-for-one split in 2021. Apple split four-for-one in 2020, and Tesla split three-for-one in 2022. Size is measured by market value, the share price times the number of shares, and that is what sets a company’s weight in the indexes. For the same reason our tables compare percentage changes rather than dollar moves: a $5 move means far more for a $200 stock than for a $500 one.
Reading a Mega-Cap Week
Four questions cover most of what a weekly table can tell you.
- Did the four move together? If all four rise or fall with SPY, the driver is probably broad: a move in Treasury yields, inflation or jobs data, or a shift in risk appetite that also shows up in the VIX. A wide split points to company news. The week to July 31, 2026 in our archive is an extreme case: Microsoft gained 21.75% while Apple fell 7.24%.
- Who beat SPY? A stock that holds up in a down week, or leads in an up week, is showing relative strength. One week means little on its own, which is why the scorecard above counts it over time.
- Was volume heavy? Each post compares the day’s volume with the stock’s average. A big move on one and a half to two times normal volume usually reflects real news and large investors repositioning. On June 26, 2026, Apple fell 6.12% on more than twice its average volume. The same move on light volume is easier to reverse.
- Where is the stock in its 52-week range? A stock pressing against its high is in a different position from one bouncing off its low, even if the weekly change is the same.
Earnings Weeks
Apple, Microsoft, and Tesla report quarterly results within a few weeks of each other, starting in late January, April, July, and October. NVIDIA’s fiscal calendar runs about a month later, so it reports in late February, May, August, and November. Daily moves of 5% to 10% after earnings are common for these stocks despite their size. Weeks that include a report are the ones most likely to show a wide split in the table. The reaction usually says more about expectations than about the results themselves: a company can beat forecasts and still fall if investors wanted more.
When Size Cuts Both Ways
When these stocks rally, index returns look strong even if most other companies are flat. When they fall together, index funds that look diversified can drop sharply. Our SPY vs QQQ guide covers how this concentration shows up at the index level and how to check whether the rest of the market is taking part.
Weekly Mega-Cap Archive
Through October 2, 2026, we published a mega-cap analysis every Saturday based on the Friday U.S. session close. Since then, the four stocks are covered in our Sunday weekly report, also based on Friday’s close, and those weeks are added here. The table shows the weekly percentage change from each post, with the best of the four in bold. The first two posts in the series reported daily changes only.
| Session | AAPL | MSFT | NVDA | TSLA | SPY |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| October 9, 2026 | +0.88% | +3.39% | -2.00% | +3.27% | +1.16% |
| October 2, 2026 | -2.16% | +0.26% | +3.95% | -0.41% | -0.22% |
| September 11, 2026 | +1.24% | -2.84% | -4.34% | -2.90% | -1.15% |
| September 4, 2026 | +0.08% | -2.69% | +5.89% | +1.53% | +0.11% |
| August 28, 2026 | +3.33% | +6.30% | +1.31% | -3.89% | +0.48% |
| August 21, 2026 | +1.12% | -2.27% | -4.64% | +6.02% | -1.37% |
| August 14, 2026 | -2.28% | -0.92% | +0.54% | +4.17% | +0.40% |
| August 7, 2026 | +1.43% | +7.59% | +11.56% | +5.58% | +3.51% |
| July 31, 2026 | -7.24% | +21.75% | -2.94% | -0.58% | +1.10% |
| July 24, 2026 | -0.22% | -3.08% | +1.99% | -17.81% | -0.59% |
| July 17, 2026 | +5.84% | +2.26% | -3.86% | -6.60% | -1.54% |
| July 9, 2026 | +7.42% | +0.02% | +2.63% | -4.41% | +0.80% |
| July 2, 2026 | +12.17% | +10.67% | -0.46% | +4.89% | +1.43% |
| June 26, 2026 | — | — | — | — | — |
| June 19, 2026 | — | — | — | — | — |
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