The stock market has given investors some relief over the past several days, with major indexes bouncing sharply from the losses they had seen earlier in the month. However, it looked as though some of the wind got taken out of Wall Street's sails on Wednesday morning, as stock futures were broadly lower. The Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX: ^IXIC) took the brunt of the hit, as futures traded lower by nearly 2% as of 8 a.m. ET.

The Nasdaq is a hotbed of innovation, boasting hundreds of small companies vying to disrupt their respective industries. Yet a handful of trillion-dollar giants still dominate the index, and investors in two of them got news that sent their share prices sharply lower. The impact of what Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) and Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) (NASDAQ: GOOG) said rippled across the Nasdaq Wednesday morning, and market participants are examining the latest financial results from the two tech stocks to try to divine what could happen to other businesses in tech and elsewhere.

Shares of Microsoft were down more than 6% in premarket trading on Wednesday. The move came amid mixed results for the fiscal first quarter that ended Sept. 30, which featured solid revenue growth but ongoing pressure on profits.

Continue reading

Source Fool.com