2025-08: AAPL steadily building AI capability driving US stocks
AAPL is driving the prices of US stocks, and global assets, in 6 months, as computed by tsterm.com methodology.
Search for “QQQ.US;SPY.US;DIA.US” on tsterm.com, the current top two causal predictors of the three US major stock index ETFs (exchange-traded fund) are
In Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference in June 2025, Apple announced new application features in Apple Intelligence. The AI models run inside the Apple’s device, protecting the privacy. The features they choose: live translation etc are unlikely to go ridiculously wrong without being detected by users.
A little covered story is that they are developing their own Machine Learning library MLX in open source, clearly winning in size and compactness. We will follow up with an article on it.
The KLA Corporation checks the quality of manufactured semiconductor.
What are the three US major stock indices?
Nasdaq 100 index, S&P 500 index, Dow Jones Industrial Average index. A stock index is a basket of selected stocks. The S&P 500, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with their numerous stock constituents, have long been considered representative of the health of the US economy.
A stock index’s value is calculated by a certain averaging of the constituents’ prices. The three indices are not mutually exclusive in their constituents. For example Nvidia the AI chip maker, has stock NVDA as a constituent of all the three indices.
What is an exchange-traded fund? Why does tsterm.com use the price of the exchange-traded fund tracking a stock index, rather than the value of the stock index directly?
An exchange-traded fund is a fund of multiple stocks managed by a company, listed on a public exchange for trading. The exchange-traded fund tracking a stock index may not match exactly the index in terms of the constituents and their weights, but will try to replicate closely the performance of the stock index as a whole.
QQQ tracks the Nasdaq 100 index. SPY tracks the S&P 500 index. DIA tracks the Dow Jones Industrial Average index.
Prices for the exchange-traded funds are usually widely (and cheaply) available from data vendor to data vendor, but far less so are the stock indices.