Bay Area stocks Apple, Pandora and GoPro lose ground, again. But it’s Amazon that gets the most attention, and rises, as it says it will buy Whole Foods for $13.7 billion.
Bay Area stocks slogged through Friday’s trading session, with the likes of Apple, Pandora and GoPro closing the week in the red.
But it was the performance of a company not based here that grabbed everyone’s attention early in the day and didn’ t let go of it by the time the stock market closed: Amazon shares rose 2.4 percent, to close at $987.71, after the online retailing giant said it would pay $13.7 billion in cash to acquire premium grocery-store chain Whole Foods Markets. The deal includes all 34 Bay Area Whole Foods stores.
Apple shed 1.4 percent to close at $142.27. Early in the day, Apple said it hired Jamie Erlicht and Zack Van Amburg away from Sony Pictures Television to head up Apple’s original TV programming efforts.
GoPro and Pandora continued their recent spate of losses, with GoPro shares falling 3.7 percent to $7.77, and Pandora giving up 4.3 percent to close at $6.99 a share.
Electronic-payment technology company Square saw its shares give up 1.8 percent to finish the week at $23.56. Before trading began, Credit Suisse cut its rating on Square’s stock to neutral from outperform on the grounds that the company’s shares are at their peak valuation.
The tech-focused Nasdaq Composite Index gave up 0.2 percent to close at 6,151.76, the blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up by 0.1 percent to end the day at 21,384.28 and the broad-based Standard & Poor’s 500 Index nudge up by less than 1 point to 2,433.15.
