The stock market sank Monday as Nvidia and other superstars created by the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology dimmed some more.
The S&P 500 fell 0.9% and pulled further from its all-time high set late last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 557 points, or 1.2%, and the Nasdaq composite sank 0.8%.
Nvidia was the heaviest weight on the market, as it’s often been in its last couple of tumultuous weeks. The chip company fell 1.8%, while losses for other AI winners included a 6.4% slide for Super Micro Computer.
Other areas of the market that had been high-momentum winners also sank. Bitcoin fell below $92,000, down from nearly $125,000 last month, for example. That helped drag down Coinbase Global by 7.1% and Robinhood Markets by 5.3%.
Critics have been warning that the U.S. stock market could be primed for a drop because of how high prices have shot since April, leaving them looking too expensive. Critics point in particular to stocks swept up in the AI mania, which have been surging at spectacular speeds for years.
Even with Monday’s loss, Nvidia is still up 39% for the year after it doubled in price in four of the last five years.
That has Wall Street’s spotlight on Wednesday, when Nvidia will report how much profit it made during the summer. AI stocks have surged as much as they have because of expectations that they’ll produce huge growth in profits. If they fail to top analysts’ expectations, that would undercut one of the big assumptions that’s driven the U.S. stock market to records.
Such high expectations extend beyond tech stocks, even if they are toughest for AI darlings.
Aramark fell 5.2% after the company reported a profit for the latest quarter that fell short of analysts’ expectations. The company, which offers food and facilities management for schools, national parks and convention centers, also said it expects an underlying measure of profit to grow between 20% and 25% next year. While relatively strong, that was less than what analysts had been forecasting.
That helped offset a rise of 3.1% for Alphabet. It jumped after Berkshire Hathaway said it built a $4.34-billion ownership stake in Google’s parent company. Berkshire Hathaway, run by famed investor Warren Buffett, is famous for trying to buy stocks only when they look like good values while avoiding anything that looks too expensive.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 61.70 points to 6,672.41. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 557.24 to 46,590.24, and the Nasdaq composite sank 192.51 to 22,708.07.
Another source of potential disappointment for Wall Street is what the Federal Reserve does with interest rates. The expectation had been that the Fed would keep cutting rates in hopes of shoring up the slowing job market. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give a boost to the economy and to prices for investments.
But questions are rising about whether a third cut for the year will come out of the Fed’s next meeting in December, something that traders had seen as very likely. The downside of lower interest rates is that they can make inflation worse, and inflation stubbornly has remained above the Fed’s 2% target.
Fed officials also have pointed to the U.S. government’s shutdown, which delayed the release of updates on the job market and other signals about the economy. With less information and less certainty about how things are going, some Fed officials suggested it may be better to wait in December to get more clarity.
Now that the shutdown is over, the government is preparing to release September’s delayed jobs report Thursday. That could create further swings for the market. Data that’s very strong likely would stay the Fed’s hand on rate cuts, while figures that are very weak would raise worries about the economy.
Next year the Fed is likely to cut interest rates only in response to a slowing economy instead of trying to cut ahead of it, according to Barry Bannister, chief equity strategist at Stifel. That’s not as good an environment for stock prices, and Bannister said the “Fed’s ‘free lunch’ is over.”
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.13% from 4.14% late Friday.
In stock markets abroad, indexes fell modestly across much of Europe and Asia. Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1% after the government reported that the Japanese economy contracted at a 1.8% annual pace in the July-September quarter. South Korea’s Kospi was an outlier and jumped 1.9% as tech-related stocks there did well.
Choe writes for the Associated Press.
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