Wall Street flirts with a record as indexes drift
Wall Street is flirting with a record again as U.S. stock indexes creep higher on Tuesday.
The S&P 500 was up 0.1% in early trading and just above its all-time closing high set last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 59 points, or 0.2%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% higher.
Entergy jumped 4.3% and helped lead the market. The electric company, which serves customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas, reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.
That helped offset a 6.6% drop for Conagra, which lowered its forecasts for upcoming profit and other financial measures. The food company said supply issues have hurt two of its product lines: frozen meals containing chicken and frozen vegetables.
U.S. stocks have broadly climbed back toward record heights even though recent big disruptions seemed set to derail their long, upward trend that began in 2022.
Hanging over everything has been the threat of a punishing global trade war following President Donald Trump's announcements of tariffs. But Wall Street has been taking such actions increasingly in stride, believing they are merely tools for negotiations and that they'll ultimately prove to be less painful for markets and the economy than they may seem initially.
Then there's DeepSeek, the Chinese artificial-intelligence startup that said it was able to match the performance of big U.S. rivals without having to use top-of-the-line chips. That raised worries that the deluge of investment flowing into AI development may be pull back and choke off an area of the market that's been the most responsible for its stellar gains in recent years.
But big U.S. companies have since said in recent weeks they still plan to invest billions of dollars in AI, even with DeepSeek's disruption.
Still, threats continue to hang over the stock market. Last week, two reports showed inflation across the United States is worse than economists expected. Such stubborn inflation may force a halt to the Federal Reserve's cuts to interest rates, which began in September in order to take pressure off the economy and help the job market.
Traders have been paring their expectations for possible cuts to rates through 2025, with an increasing number saying they foresee zero. That in turn has pushed up Treasury yields in the bond market, which typically drag downward on prices for stocks and other investments.
Treasury yields rose again Tuesday, with the yield on the 10-year Treasury rising to 4.52% from 4.48% late Friday. Like the stock market, bond trading was closed Monday in observance of the Presidents Day holiday.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were modestly higher across much of Europe and Asia.
Source: Associated Press
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