The regular session sorted Thursday's after-hours reporters. Amazon pared a 7% early drop to about 2%, while Reddit fell nearly 30% to a 52-week low and Sandisk's slide deepened to about 15%.
Thursday evening's earnings reactions were a first draft. Friday's regular session rewrote several of them.
The biggest revision came at Amazon. The stock had been indicated about 7% lower before the open after a fourth-quarter forecast that came in below analysts' expectations and a free cash outflow of about $42 billion over 12 months. It opened at $232.53, touched $229.36 and then climbed. By early afternoon it was down about 1.9% at $239.08.
No company announcement accompanied the recovery. Amazon's quarter included its highest operating margin on record and 39% growth at Amazon Web Services, figures that gave buyers something to defend once the opening selling passed.
The ones that got worse
Several other Thursday reporters fell further in regular trading than they had overnight.
Reddit dropped about 29.9% to $90.82, after touching a 52-week low of $89.97, compared with a decline of about 23% before the open. Illumina fell about 19.2% to $234.48, from about 11% overnight. Sandisk's loss widened sharply to about 14.6%, from about 4% before the open, as memory and storage stocks sold off with the rest of the chip sector. Coinbase fell about 13.8% to a 52-week low.
The ones that held or improved
Roblox, down about 19%, and Twilio, down about 17.2%, finished the morning roughly where they had been indicated. Twilio touched $180 before recovering to about $200.
Stryker narrowed its loss to about 5.1% at $296.02, from about 9.6% overnight, after opening at $284.94. Pinterest narrowed to about 6.3% from about 9%. Starbucks slipped about 1.5%. Rivian held a gain of about 2.2%, down from about 7.4% before the open.
What the pattern says
Part of the split followed the day's market. Sandisk and Coinbase, tied to storage and crypto, fell further as those groups sold off. But Reddit and Illumina, neither tied to those groups, also fell further, while Stryker and Pinterest found buyers once the session opened. The session did not show a single pattern, and no company statement explained the moves.
Amazon sits between the two. Its stock recovered even as the Nasdaq fell about 3%, which suggests investors were more willing to look past the cash outflow than the overnight move implied. Whether that holds is a question for the close and next week.
What to watch
Closing prices for all of Thursday's reporters, and whether Amazon's recovery survives a weak tape into month-end.