Stocks tumble as the S&P 500 ends its worst week in three months

• U.S. stocks closed lower on Friday, marking the worst week for the S&P 500 since mid-April.

• A global IT outage caused by a Crowdstrike update worsened Friday’s stock market decline.

• Next week, investors will focus on Tesla and Alphabet’s upcoming earnings, as well as the release of economic data.

U.S. stocks closed lower on Friday, capping off the worst week for the S&P 500 since mid-April.

Friday’s decline extended the trend of smaller cap stocks outperform their large cap peers, which was initially fueled by a cooler-than-expected June inflation report last week.

Friday’s stock price drop was compounded by a global IT outage that plagued computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

The IT outage was caused by a bug in a CrowdStrike update and ultimately led to canceled and delayed flights, banking outages, and more widespread disruptions.

Crowdstrike said it had identified the issue and was implementing a fix. Shares of the cybersecurity provider fell by about 10%.

Investors got their first glimpse of earnings figures this week, with major banks like Goldman Sachs reporting solid results on Monday.

Netflix reported better-than-expected revenue, profit and subscriber growth in its second-quarter earnings report on Thursday, but the stock fell about 2% on somewhat weak guidance for the third quarter.

According to data from Fundstrat, 13% of S&P 500 companies have reported second-quarter earnings. Of these companies, 81% exceed profit expectations by an average of 4%, while 61% exceed revenue expectations by an average of 3%.

Over the next week, investors will be closely watching Tesla and Alphabet’s mega-cap tech earnings results, June’s Core PCE inflation data, and second-quarter GDP numbers.

Here’s where the US indexes stood at 4pm on Friday:

Here’s what else happened today:

The story continues

In commodities, bonds and crypto:

• West Texas average Crude oil fell 3.15% to $78.74 per barrel. Brent crude oilthe international benchmark, fell 2.75% to $82.77 per barrel.

• Gold fell 2.23% to $2,401.60 an ounce.

• The yield on ten-year government bonds rose by three basis points to 4.24%.

• Bitcoin rose 5.26% to $67,344.

Read the original article Business insider