Wall Street drifts in mixed trading as Walmart’s profit impresses.
U.S. stocks are drifting in mixed trading on Tuesday after clawing back losses from earlier in the morning.
The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged, as of 11 a.m. Eastern time, after erasing an early drop of 0.7%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 204 points, or 0.5%, while the Nasdaq composite flipped a loss to turn 0.3% higher.
Stocks were doing worse in Europe, where France’s CAC 40 index fell 1% and Germany’s DAX lost 1.1% after Russia said Ukraine fired six U.S.-made ATACMS missiles at it. Earlier in the day, Russian President Vladimir Putin formally lowered the threshold for Russia’s use of its nuclear weapons.
Worries about the escalations in the Russia-Ukraine war sent investors into U.S. Treasury bonds, which are seen as some of the world’s safest investments. The rise in their prices in turn lowered their yields, and the 10-year Treasury yield fell to 4.37% from 4.41% late Monday.
Gold also rose 0.5% and recovered some of the losses it sustained following Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, as investors herded into places traditionally considered safer during times of trouble.
Such cautiousness had overshadowed optimism coming from reports by big U.S. retailers showing fatter profits for the summer than analysts expected.
Walmart climbed 4.2% after topping forecasts for both profit and revenue. The nation’s biggest retailer said it saw broad-based strength across its categories, including sales made both online and in stores. It also said it served more upper-income households while raising its forecasts for sales and profit for the full year.
Other big companies set to report their latest quarterly results this week include Nvidia and Target on Wednesday and Deere on Thursday.
Nvidia, with a total market value of roughly $3.5 trillion, will need to hit analysts’ high expectations for growth during the latest quarter to justify its big stock price, which has surged more than 190% this year amid Wall Street’s frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology. The chip company’s profit report may be the highlight for the U.S. stock market this week, and its 2.9% rise on Tuesday was the strongest force pushing upward on the S&P 500.
Elsewhere on Wall Street, Super Micro Computer jumped 30.5% after it filed a plan to keep its stock listed on Nasdaq’s exchange. It also said it hired an independent auditor, which can help it file financial statements needed to comply with Nasdaq’s listing requirements.
The company’s stock has been on a wild ride. It more than quadrupled in the first two and a half months of this year because the company makes servers used in AI. But it gave up all that and more, with losses accelerating after Ernst & Young resigned as its public accounting firm. A special committee of the company’s board later said that a three-month investigation found “no evidence of fraud or misconduct on the part of management or the Board of Directors.”
Berry Global Group rose 3.7% after Amcor said it would buy the maker of prescription vials, bags and other products in an all-stock deal. Amcor slipped 0.3%.
Incyte tumbled 11.1% after the biopharmaceutical company said it’s pausing enrollment in its ongoing study of a potential treatment for hives in chronic spontaneous urticaria. It also said data from another study evaluating a potential treatment for cholestatic pruritus does not support further development.
In stock markets abroad, indexes in Asia were more stable than in Europe. They rose 0.7% in Shanghai and 0.4% in Hong Kong, rebounding from early losses.
Source: https://apnews.com/article/stocks-markets-trump-nvidia-china-38a65c5879641d00d0e3af05c033af44