Stocks Roar Back From Morning Wipeout

8% gain for Nvidia helped lift S&P 500
By Newser Editors and Wire Services
Posted Sep 11, 2024 3:46 PM CDT
Stocks Roar Back From Morning Wipeout
The American flag hangs from the front of the New York Stock Exchange on Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2024.   (AP Photo/Peter Morgan)

US stock indexes stormed back from big early drops to finish higher on Wednesday, led by a handful of highly influential Big Tech companies.

  • The S&P 500 rose 58.61 points, or 1.1%, to 5,554.13 after erasing a morning wipeout of 1.6%. A majority of the index's stocks still finished lower for the day, but gains for Nvidia and other tech stocks were enough to drive it to a third straight gain and back within 2% of its all-time high set in July.
  • The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 124.75 points, or 0.3%, to 40,861.71 after rallying back from a drop of 743 points.
  • The Nasdaq composite rose 369.65 points, or 2.2%, to 17,395.53. It roared back from an earlier 1.4% slide.
Beside the 8% rise for Nvidia, gains of 2.7% for Amazon and 2.2% for Microsoft were also big forces lifting the S&P 500, the AP reports.

The sharp see-saw trading followed the government's latest update on inflation at the consumer level, which came in close to expectations. Overall inflation slowed to 2.5% in August from 2.9% in July, a touch better than expected. But prices rose more than expected from July into August when ignoring food and energy, and economists say that can be a better predictor of where inflation is heading.

  • All together, the data seemed to confirm that the Fed will indeed cut its main interest rate at its meeting next week, which would be the first such cut in more than four years. But it bolstered expectations that the Fed will begin with only a traditional-sized move of a quarter of a percentage point instead of the more severe half-point that some had been expecting. "This isn't the CPI report the market wanted to see," says Seema Shah, chief global strategist at Principal Asset Management.

  • A worry on Wall Street is that the cuts may prove to be too late, with many US shoppers already struggling under the weight of high prices. Vera Bradley's stock dropped 4.6% after the designer of handbags and the parent company of the Pura Vida brand reported weaker profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It pointed to "stubbornly persistent macro consumer headwinds."
  • Elsewhere on Wall Street, Trump Media & Technology Group sank 10.5% the day after Donald Trump's debate with Kamala Harris. It was down as much at 17% in the morning.
  • On the winning side were solar-energy companies, which are seen as doing better under a Democratic White House than a Republican one. First Solar jumped 15.2%.
(More stock market stories.)

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