Wall Street holds relatively steady in mixed trading even as Nvidia gets back to falling

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting in mixed trading on Tuesday, a slowdown after swinging from their first losing week in four to Monday’s roar back.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.2% in early trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 78 points, or 0.2%, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.4% lower. All three are still near their all-time highs, but they’ve been shaky recently.

Much of the focus was on Nvidia and other winners of the artificial-intelligence frenzy, as usual. Their sensational growth has been a major reason the U.S. stock market has set records despite a slowing job market and still-high inflation. But their prices have shot so high that critics say they look too expensive and are reminiscent of the 2000 dot-com bubble that ultimately burst nearly halved the S&P 500.

Nvidia sank 2.1% after SoftBank, a Japanese technology giant that had been a major investor, said it had sold its entire stake last month for $5.83 billion in the AI chip company. SoftBank is not giving up on AI. It’s still focusing on OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

Because Nvidia is the largest company on Wall Street by value, it was the heaviest single weight dragging the S&P 500 lower. Oftentimes, it alone can dictate the movement of S&P 500 index funds, which sit at the heart of many 401(k) accounts. A day earlier, Nvidia’s rally of nearly 6% was the biggest reason the S&P 500 nearly erased all its loss from last week.

CoreWeave, whose cloud platform helps customers running artificial-intelligence workloads, fell 11.8% even though it reported a smaller loss for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its revenue also topped expectations, and financial analysts praised its momentum. But investors seemed to focus instead on supply-chain issues that are delaying a data center and pushing some of its revenue further into the future.

On the winning side of Wall Street, BigBear.ai jumped 16.9% after reporting better results for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It also said it would buy AskSage a generative AI platform built for national-security agencies and other highly regulated areas, for $250 million.

Outside of AI, Paramount Skydance climbed 9.4%, even as the entertainment giant fell short of Wall Street’s revenue and profit targets. It was the company’s first earnings report since Skydance closed its acquisition of Paramount in early August, and investors were apparently encouraged that it raised its 2026 cost-cutting goal to $3 billion from the previous $2 billion.

In stock markets abroad, indexes rose in Europe following a mixed finish in Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1% even though SoftBank climbed 2%. Besides the sale of its Nvidia stake, the tech giant also reported a much better profit than analysts expected.

The U.S. bond market is closed for the Veterans Day holiday.

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