Top 10 Stocks to Watch — Friday, July 31
Samsung warned the memory shortage runs into 2028, AWS grew 37%, and the semiconductor complex just posted its best session in fifteen months. Ten names worth watching into month-end, with the dated August catalysts behind three of them.
Month-end lands on the back of a strange week. Three sessions ago the AI trade was breaking: memory names in freefall, the KOSPI heading for its worst month since 1997, the market busy pricing a capex bubble. Then Microsoft's fiscal Q4 print landed Wednesday night with Azure up 43% and capital spending guided above $50 billion for the current quarter, and Samsung's memory chief told analysts on Thursday that the supply shortage worsens in 2027 and continues into 2028. The complex reversed violently. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index put up its best session in roughly fifteen months, and Micron closed Thursday at $874.66, up 18.36%, bid near $912 this morning.
It is worth naming precisely what that was: a reversal, not a breakout. Nothing about Thursday resolved the underlying argument over whether AI capital spending converts into cash flow. It removed the immediate evidence for the bear case. Positioning was short, the covering was violent, and the follow-through today is the actual test.
Amazon and Apple then split the mega-cap tape in opposite directions after the close, which is why futures look uneven rather than uniformly strong. Nasdaq 100 futures are up about 1.1% at 28,544, S&P 500 futures up roughly 0.35%, Dow futures up 0.49%, Russell futures up 0.41%. The 10-year sits near 4.66%, the dollar index near 100.28, gold is off about 1.2%, and WTI is firmer by 1.4%. The calendar is thin but not empty: the Q2 Employment Cost Index at 8:30 a.m. ET (consensus near 0.8% quarter over quarter versus 0.9% prior) is the print that matters for the wage-inflation argument, followed by Chicago PMI and the final July University of Michigan sentiment read. Month-end rebalancing will distort the last hour regardless of what any of it says.
All prices below are pre-market prints from the Nasdaq consolidated feed, timestamped between 7:00 and 7:40 a.m. ET, with Thursday's close for reference. These are watch candidates and scenarios, not recommendations.
1. $AMZN, Amazon.com
$261.76 pre-market, up 11.15%. Prior close $235.50, up 3.90%.
AWS grew 37% year over year to $42.23 billion, its fastest rate since 2021, against roughly $40.5 billion expected. Total net sales rose 20% to $200.6 billion. For eighteen months the bear case on Amazon has been that cloud growth had structurally decelerated while capital spending ran away from it. A 37% print is the hardest single datapoint against that argument anyone has produced this cycle, and it arrived two days after Microsoft made the same case from the other side of the market.
The complication is that an 11% gap in a company this size is not a small thing to hold. Gaps of that magnitude in mega caps frequently see the opening print become the high of the session as short-dated option hedges unwind.
Watch for: whether the stock holds above its opening range through the first hour. A first-hour high that goes unrevisited is a very different tape from a steady grind, and the difference usually declares itself fast.
2. $AXTI, AXT Inc.
$62.47 pre-market, up 33.09%. Prior close $46.94, up 26.97%.
The largest mover on the board, and the one most likely to be miscategorized. AXT is not a memory story. It makes indium phosphide substrates for AI data center optical interconnect, and the Q2 earnings call does not mention DRAM or HBM once. The correct comparison set is Lumentum and Coherent.
Three things stacked inside 72 hours. On Wednesday, AXT signed a definitive supply and capacity reservation agreement with Lumentum running through the end of 2031, carrying two deposits of $43.5 million each. Thursday after the close, Q2 revenue came in at $47.59 million, up 164% year over year against roughly $34.8 million expected, with non-GAAP gross margin at 45.0% versus 8.2% a year ago. Then management guided Q3 to about $66 million, roughly 70% above consensus, and specified that the figure counts only revenue backed by export permits already in hand. That last detail is what de-risks the China overhang that has capped this stock for two years. B. Riley cut its target to $52 on Tuesday, two days before the print. The stock is gapping straight through it.
Watch for: the revision wave. A stock trading above every price target on the Street is either about to collect a wall of upgrades or about to find out why it did not. Note also that a 33% gap on top of Thursday's 27% puts this name up roughly 64% in two sessions on a market cap under $3 billion. Volatility cuts both directions at that pace.
3. $NVT, nVent Electric
$159.09 pre-market, up 9.87%. Prior close $144.80, up 8.38%.
The cleanest beat and raise of the morning, and the one drawing the least attention because nobody thinks of electrical enclosures as an AI trade. Q2 revenue was $1.471 billion, up 53% year over year and 47% organic, against roughly $1.25 billion expected. Adjusted EPS of $1.45 beat $1.16 by about 25%.
The guidance is the actual story. Management took full-year adjusted EPS to $5.00 to $5.10 from $4.45 to $4.55, and reported sales growth to 37% to 39% from 26% to 28%. That is the second large raise this year. Systems Protection, the liquid cooling and enclosure segment, grew 70%. On the same morning, the company announced another manufacturing expansion for liquid cooling capacity.
This is the shovels-and-pipes layer of the data center buildout, and right now it is compounding faster than the chips it cools.
Watch for: whether nVent and Eaton, which also reported this morning, trade together through the session. If both hold their gains it argues the electrical infrastructure trade is being repriced as a group rather than as two individual beats. Divergence would point to something company-specific in one of them.
The rest of this briefing is for paid members: the two dated August catalysts that make one storage name the highest-clarity setup on this list, the semiconductor equipment company whose own guidance is now provably stale, the small cap that just called a cyclical bottom in test, the nuclear name that missed badly on earnings and rose anyway because of what it filed with the SEC this morning, and the watch levels and triggers for entries four through ten.
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