Q3 Biggest Stock Winners: Apple (AAPL), Amazon (AMZN), Nvidia (NVDA)

By Douglas A. McIntyre Published Sep 30, 7:21AM EDT

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Big tech continued to do extraordinarily well in the third quarters. Stocks that would seem to have outrun their earnings continued to climb.

Among the members of the S&P 500, Apple (AAPL) rose 27% to $153.47, very near its multi-year high. The market still believes that Mac sales will be strong into the holiday season and that new versions of the iPod will continue to expand that franchise.

Amazon (AMZN) kept moving North. Its shares rose 37% and now are up 137% for the year. The company has launched its own music download service and the video Unbox product. But, it share price increase may have more to do with the market’s belief that AMZN will keep its marketing and technology costs down.

Nvidia (NVDA), the graphics chip maker, is benefiting from the surge in laptop sales Improved graphics performance is critical to most PC with the rising of computer based video games and increased online video consumption.

Among members of the Dow, tech stocks also did extraordinarily well. HP (HPQ) rose 13%. Its lead in PC sales helped its share price. IBM (IBM) rose 12% for the quarter. Its software services business continued to grow and cost cutting activity at the firm appears to reap endless benefits.

Douglas A. McIntyre

About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.