Well, we finish out the week with yet another dramatic performance from the market-dominating tech stocks. Alphabet (GOOG) did better than expected and popped a bit, climbing further through the day, almost as much as the gains Microsoft (MSFT) made on a more dramatic ‘beat’ of expectations (though analysts have always been better at estimating Microsoft’s numbers than Alphabet’s)… and Amazon (AMZN) beat on revenues, even after accounting for Whole Foods, and perhaps beat on earnings (it’s always hard to tell, they did “beat” but they had also dramatically lowered expectations last time out… and it seems no one really cares what Amazon’s actual profits are as long as the revenue keeps growing).

All that comes despite their Amazon’s creepy “let us into your house” delivery offering announced this week. Good news for those three tech giants is good news for pretty much everyone, given the huge sway they hold over the broader markets (Facebook jumped half as much as Alphabet in sympathy, thanks to “if ads are good to Google, they’ll probably be good to Facebook, too” reasoning, which will either be confirmed or not on Thursday when FB reports). Amazon’s revenue growth continues to be one of the most overwhelming things I’ve ever seen — as is the investor enthusiasm for the shares while Amazon invests all of their cash flow and their considerable cloud services profits into further market dominance in e-commerce. It’s Jeff Bezos’ world, the rest of us just live in it… hopefully he’ll be a benevolent overlord.

And Apple (AAPL) didn’t release earnings this week, their report will come out on Thursday, but they did something more important — they finally released the “new” new iPhone the iPhone X, so we can finally start freaking out about deliveries and timetables and, in about a week, get our hands on one so we can cut it open and see what chips are inside and see which suppliers “won” (OK, we won’t do that — but all the teardown services will).

That release has spurred some optimism in iPhone suppliers over the past few days as rumors about when the production bottleneck might clear and what the total iPhone sales will be like have swirled, and now we’ve had, at least, confirmation that there’s strong demand for the iPhone X as the limited number available for the first day sold out immediately ...