Heading into earnings season, there was a considerable amount of angst on the part of investors regarding the mega-cap stocks and how they would react to their earnings reports. Given their outperformance in Q1, the prevailing view was that the bar was too high, leaving the mega-caps susceptible to disappointment when they reported. Within the S&P 500, there are seven companies whose weighting exceeds 1.5% in the index, and in the chart below we list the performance of each company’s stock (largest to smallest) on the earnings reaction day of their most recent report.

Of the seven companies highlighted, only two (Alphabet GOOGL and Amazon.com AMZN) declined in reaction to their reports. Two stocks (Nvidia NVDA and META) surged more than 10%, one (Microsoft MSFT) rallied more than 7%, and Apple AAPL, with its weighting of over 7%, managed to rise more than 4.5% following its report last week. There’s still a ton of reports left to get through before earnings season winds down, but on a market cap basis, we’re past the peak, and based on the reactions of the largest companies in the market, it’s been a much better earnings season than most investors expected.

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