Stocks fall as S&P 500 ends worst week in 3 months

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

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

• Next week, investors will focus on upcoming earnings from Tesla and Alphabet, as well as economic data releases.

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

Friday’s decline extended the trend of Small-cap stocks outperform their large-cap counterparts, which was initially triggered by a colder-than-expected June inflation report last week.

The drop in stock prices on Friday was aggravated by a global computer outage which affected computers running Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

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

Crowdstrike said it has identified the issue and deployed a fix. The cybersecurity vendor fell about 10%.

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

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

According to Fundstrat data, 13% of S&P 500 companies have reported their second-quarter results. Of those companies, 81% are beating earnings estimates by an average of 4%, while 61% are beating revenue estimates by an average of 3%.

In the coming week, investors will be closely watching results from large-cap tech companies Tesla and Alphabet, June core PCE inflation data and second-quarter GDP figures.

Here’s where the U.S. indices stood at 4 p.m. Friday close:

Here’s what else happened today:

The story continues

In commodities, bonds and cryptocurrencies:

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

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

• The 10-year Treasury yield rose three basis points to 4.24%.

• Bitcoin increased 5.26% to $67,344.

Read the original article on Business Insider