Magnificent Seven Stocks: Index Weights, Earnings Dates and How They Move

Apple is up 25% this year and Tesla is down 17%, yet both still sit in the same group. The Magnificent Seven stocks are Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Tesla, the seven US tech giants that together make up about 35% of the S&P 500. Their quarterly earnings, all due between October 21 and November 17, 2026, move the whole index.

That 42-point gap between the best and worst performer is the reason to stop treating the group as one trade. The label still describes who carries the weight in US indices. It no longer describes how the seven stocks behave. This guide covers their weight in the S&P 500, Nasdaq 100 and Dow, the Q3 2026 earnings dates with times, and what separates one stock from the next.

Magnificent Seven stocks at a glance

Weights come from the daily holdings of the largest S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 tracking funds as of October 19, 2026. Price changes run from the December 31, 2025 close to the October 20, 2026 close and exclude dividends.

Sources: SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY) holdings, Invesco QQQ holdings, daily closes from Yahoo Finance, company investor-relations releases for dates.

Three of the seven beat the S&P 500 this year. Four trailed it. An equal-weighted basket of the seven is up about 8.8%, four points behind the index they supposedly carry.

Where the name came from, and why the list is out of date

Michael Hartnett, chief investment strategist at Bank of America, coined the name in a May 2023 note, borrowing it from the 1960 western. In mid-2023 the seven were driving most of the US market’s gains on the back of the AI trade.

Three years later the list is a snapshot of 2023. In the S&P 500, Broadcom (2.4%) now outweighs both Meta and Tesla, and Micron (1.5%) sits right behind Tesla. In the Nasdaq 100 fund the gap is wider: Micron at 4.4% and AMD at 3.8% both rank above Meta and Tesla. The group has kept its original seven names while the index weights kept moving.

For a trader, the practical point is narrow. When analysts quote a “Magnificent Seven” earnings figure, it covers these seven companies only, not the seven largest stocks of today.

How much of each index the Magnificent Seven make up

The weight decides how far one report can push an index. Nvidia at 7.9% of the S&P 500 means a 10% move in Nvidia shifts the index by roughly 0.8% on its own, before any other stock moves.

• S&P 500 (US500): the seven hold 34.7% of the S&P 500. Nvidia and Apple alone are 15.5%.
• Nasdaq 100 (USTEC): 38.9% of the Nasdaq 100 fund. The index holds only 100 non-financial Nasdaq-listed companies, so each giant takes a bigger slice than in the S&P 500.
• Dow Jones (US30): 19.4% of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Dow weights by share price, not market capitalization, so Microsoft is its biggest Magnificent Seven member at 6.1% and Nvidia only 2.5%. Meta and Tesla are not in the Dow at all.

The Dow count rose to five this year. S&P Dow Jones Indices announced on June 23, 2026 that Alphabet would replace Verizon before the open on June 29. The mechanics of how each weighting method passes an earnings report through to the index are covered in how earnings season affects stock indices.

Magnificent Seven earnings dates for Q3 2026

All seven report after the US close. Five of them land inside nine days. US clocks change on November 1, so the gap between Eastern Time and UTC is four hours for the October reports and five hours for the November ones.

Dates come from the companies: Meta IR, Tesla’s Q3 deliveries release, Microsoft’s October 7 notice, Alphabet IR and Amazon IR. Apple’s date was set on October 6. Nvidia’s November 17 date comes from its investor-relations team on the August 26 call; the formal announcement has not been published yet.

October 28 is the crowded day. The Federal Reserve announces its rate decision at 2:00 PM ET, and Microsoft and Alphabet, about 11.5% of the S&P 500 between them, report about two and a half hours later. Index CFDs can take three hits in one evening.

Company-by-company detail, including past reactions and consensus, sits on the individual pages: Meta earnings date, Tesla earnings date and Alphabet earnings date. The wider calendar is in the earnings season guide.

Earnings growth: two stocks are doing most of the work

FactSet expects the seven to grow Q3 earnings by 33.2% from a year earlier, against 27.7% for the other 493 companies in the S&P 500, according to its October 19 report. The headline flatters the group.

Take out Nvidia and Meta and the remaining five are expected to grow 7.5%. Meta’s number is also inflated by its base: a year ago it booked a one-time $15.93 billion tax charge, which cut Q3 2025 earnings per share to $1.05. Any normal quarter looks like enormous growth against that.

The fourth quarter is where the story could turn. FactSet’s estimates put Magnificent Seven growth at 23.6% against 30.6% for everyone else. If that holds, it would be the first quarter since Q4 2022 in which the seven grow more slowly than the rest of the index. Guidance given on these calls will decide whether analysts cut or raise that 23.6%.

Capex is the number that moves these stocks now

Revenue beats are expected. What changes the share price is how much each company says it will spend on data centers, and whether investors believe the spending pays back.

• Alphabet spent $44.9 billion on capital expenditure in Q2 2026, double the $22.4 billion a year earlier, and reported negative free cash flow of $5.9 billion for the quarter (Q2 release).
• Amazon bought $54.2 billion of property and equipment in Q2, up from $32.2 billion, and its trailing 12-month free cash flow turned negative at −$7.6 billion (Q2 release).
• Meta guides 2026 capex at $130–145 billion.
• Nvidia sits on the other side of the same trade: the spending of the other four is its revenue, guided at $108 billion for the current quarter (Q2 FY27 release).

Hartnett, the strategist who named the group, described the hyperscalers in September as “negative cash flow to the tune of $200 billion.” That is the tension in every call this season. A capex raise is good news for Nvidia and a cost for the company announcing it, and the market has punished that cost before: Meta’s shares fell more than 9% in premarket trading after its July report showed free cash flow collapsing to $784 million.

One label, seven different trades

The spread in 2026 returns comes from seven separate stories, not one theme.

• Apple leads the group this year. Its iPhone revenue rose to $54.3 billion in its June quarter from $44.6 billion a year earlier.
• Nvidia trades on data-center demand and its own guidance. Its last three quarterly revenue figures each beat its own outlook by 5% to 6%, so the market prices the next guide more than the beat.
• Amazon trades on AWS, which grew 37% in Q2, its fastest pace in 18 quarters.
• Microsoft trades on Azure and the cost of building it. Its 10% gain this year sits below the index.
• Alphabet trades on Cloud growth against record spending, plus one-off gains on its equity stakes: in Q2 a $98 billion gain added $6.26 to reported earnings per share of $9.11.
• Meta trades on the gap between ad revenue growth and capex. It has gained 5% this year.
• Tesla is the outlier. Q3 deliveries fell 2.1% from a year earlier to 486,532, while energy storage deployments reached 13.7 GWh. It is the only one of the seven down in 2026.

For a trader this has a direct consequence. A strong Meta report on October 21 tells you little about Tesla the same evening, and a Microsoft capex raise on October 28 can lift Nvidia while hurting Microsoft. Reading each report on its own terms, as set out in how to read an earnings report, matters more than the group label.

How to trade the Magnificent Seven around earnings

There are two routes: the individual stock or the index that holds all seven.

Single stocks. PrimeXBT lists share CFDs on large US companies, including Amazon and Tesla, which lets you go long or short on the report without owning the shares. Microsoft is not available on the platform. For the other names, check the current share CFD list before planning a trade, since the lineup changes. A Tesla-specific approach is in the guide to trading Tesla stock.

Indices. An index CFD on US500 or USTEC gives exposure to all seven at once, weighted as in the table above. That suits a view on the season as a whole, or a trade on the evening when two of them report together. USTEC carries the heavier Magnificent Seven weight, so it reacts more to these reports than US500 does.

Either way, every report on the list lands after the cash close, so the first price you can act on comes in extended trading or at the next open. Spreads widen and gaps form around that window. Strategies for positioning before or after the release, and for managing the gap, are in how to trade earnings.

Mark October 28 first. A Fed decision and two reports covering 11.5% of the S&P 500 all arrive inside one US evening.

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