Apple's impact on the stock-market during the WWDC

Each and every time Apple collects the technology press for an event, and we take the time to track the impact of the company’s announcements on the value of its equity. The result is usually nothing at all; investors simply don’t trade Apple based on the products or services it announces.

If that surprises you, welcome to the club. You might think that the substance of what Apple announces matters to folks buying and selling its shares on any given day, but it mostly doesn’t.

Today’s chart makes this lack of connection plain. Here’s stock market data through around 3 p.m. EDT today, comparing Apple’s stock with the Nasdaq composite’s trading over the same time frame, including during its pre-recorded video presentation:

The Apple event started at around 1 p.m. EDT, and after that point, the two lines stayed together — as they had before. Honestly, it is hard to spot any real divergence at all, even though I took copious notes about minute price movements during the presentation.

But that doesn’t mean that the Apple event had no impact on the stock market. It did, in the form of taking a whacking to the value of Affirm. Affirm is a publicly traded buy now, pay later (BNPL) service, which competes with Klarna, Sezzle and other similar services from fintech giants. Apple is also getting into the game, it announced today, with a service called Apple Pay Later.

The result of that bit of news was to temporarily tank Affirm’s stock. The pink arrow points to when the Apple Pay Later news dropped:

So we did get to see Apple’s event impact a stock, just not the one that we expected it to; investors are paying attention, at least somewhat.

Sadly, not every company that was mentioned either implicitly or explicitly saw movement on Apple’s words. Bird, the e-scooter company that rode a SPAC to the public markets, is trading at $0.71 per share today, a decline of 5.4%. Apple mentioned its hardware briefly in its keynote. The stock failed to move.

Apple’s event did nothing for its own shares, hurt Affirm and failed to save Bird. So much for the reality-distortion effect.