NEW YORK: Wall Street’s main indexes were mixed on Monday as investors watched a fresh round of US-China negotiations aimed at mending a trade rift that has rattled financial markets for much of the year.
Top officials from both countries have kicked off discussions at London’s Lancaster House, looking to get back on track with a preliminary trade agreement struck last month that had briefly cooled tensions between the world’s largest economies.
“I think it’ll be a watered down deal, but it’ll be a deal, and that would alleviate some of the fear factors over tariffs,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities.
Hopes of more trade deals between the US and its major trading partners, along with upbeat earnings and tame inflation data, helped US equities rally in May, with the S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq notching their best monthly gains since November 2023.
The S&P 500 remains a little more than 2% below all-time highs touched in February, while the Nasdaq is about 3% below its record peaks reached in December.
At 11:39 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 63.46 points, or 0.15%, to 42,699.41, the S&P 500 gained 4.89 points, or 0.08%, to 6,005.25 and the Nasdaq Composite gained 59.40 points, or 0.30%, to 19,589.36.
Among market movers, shares of McDonald’s fell 1.4% after Morgan Stanley downgraded the stock to “equal-weight” from “overweight”.
Five of the 11 major S&P 500 sub-sectors fell, with the financials sector, down 0.8%, declining the most. On the flip side, information technology stocks advanced 0.4%.
Most megacap and growth stocks were up. Nvidia gained more than 1%.
Tesla was down marginally after brokerage Baird downgraded the stock to “neutral”.
Warner Bros Discovery shares jumped 7.3%, the most on the S&P 500, after the company said it would separate its studios and streaming business from its fading cable television networks.
Robinhood Markets fell 4.5% after S&P Dow Jones Indices left S&P 500 constituents unchanged in its latest rebalancing, following recent speculation that the online brokerage would be added to the benchmark index.
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