Stocks drifted to a mixed close on Tuesday following several weeks of sharp swings.
- The S&P 500 rose 24.47 points, or 0.4%, to 5,495.52.
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 92.63 points, or 0.2%, to 40,736.96.
- The Nasdaq composite rose 141.28 points, or 0.8%, to 17,025.88.
Oracle jumped 11.5% to help lead the market after delivering better profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. The
Wall Street Journal reports that the company's revenue has been boosted by its push to provide cloud services to big AI players. Gains for several influential Big Tech stocks also helped to drive indexes, including rises of 2.1% for Microsoft and 2.4% for Amazon.
But banks offset the gains following discouraging comments from several executives at an industry conference, the AP reports. JPMorgan Chase fell 5.2% after its chief operating officer said analysts' expectations for an underlying measure of profit may be "too high." Goldman Sachs dropped 4.4% after its chief executive said its trading revenue for the current quarter is trending down 10% at the moment. And Ally Financial sank 17.6% after its chief financial officer warned borrowers are "struggling with a high inflation and cost of living and now, more recently, a weakening employment picture."
Stocks of energy producers were also weak after oil prices fell. A barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, is near its lowest price since 2021, and it's been sinking amid worries about how much fuel a fragile global economy will burn. That helped drag Exxon Mobil down 3.6% and Chevron down 1.5%.
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Like stocks, Treasury yields have been swinging sharply ahead of the Federal Reserve's meeting next week, where the widespread expectation is for it to cut its main interest rate for the first time since the COVID crash of 2020. Reports coming on Wednesday and Thursday on inflation could influence the size of the Fed's upcoming cuts. The worst case for the Fed would be if inflation were to reaccelerate when the job market looks fragile, because helping either of those would require opposing moves. On Wednesday, though, economists expect the latest report on inflation to show prices for US consumers were 2.6% higher in August than a year earlier. That would be a slowdown from July's inflation rate of 2.9%
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