Wall Street holds steady near record highs

HONG KONG â€”  U.S. stocks held near their record levels on Tuesday after a quiet day of trading.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 rose 8.65 points, or 0.2%, to 5,078.18 and is just off its all-time high set last week. The Dow Jones industrial average dipped 96.82 points, or 0.2%, to 38,972.41, and the Nasdaq composite inched up 59.05 points, or 0.4%, to 16,035.30.

Macy’s climbed 3.4% after reporting better results for the latest quarter than feared. It also announced a sweeping reorganization as it tries to kick-start growth in revenue. It will close about 150 stores and focus on opening new Bloomingdale’s and Bluemercury locations.

Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings steamed 19.8% higher for the biggest gain in the S&P 500 after saying it’s seeing healthy demand from customers. It also gave a forecast for earnings this upcoming year that was bigger than analysts’ expectations.

AutoZone revved 6.7% higher after reporting a stronger profit than expected. Much of its growth last quarter came from its stores in Mexico and Brazil.

Zoom Video Communications climbed after topping analysts’ forecasts for profit last quarter. It rose 8% to $68.17, though it’s still well below its peak above $560 during the height of the pandemic. It also announced a program to buy back as much as $1.5 billion of its stock, which would send cash directly to shareholders.

Those winners helped offset a 1.5% drop for Chevron, which warned that its pending takeover of Hess may be under threat. The energy companies are in discussions with Exxon Mobil and China National Offshore Oil about a joint operating agreement for a project off Guyana’s shore. If they can’t come to an acceptable resolution, Chevron said in a filing with U.S. securities regulators, the merger with Hess may not close.

Chevron was one of the main reasons for the Dow’s slide. Hess fell 3.1%.

Nvidia was another weight on the market; it dipped 0.5%, taking a bit of shine off its jaw-dropping run. Its stock is still up nearly 59% so far this year after soaring nearly 240% last year amid Wall Street’s frenzy around artificial intelligence technology.

Moves for Nvidia’s stock pack an extra weight on the S&P 500 because it’s the third-largest stock on Wall Street by market value. It and a handful of other major tech companies have been responsible for a huge, disproportionate amount of the S&P 500’s rally since its bottom in October 2022.

To see how top-heavy the market has become, consider how the S&P 500 would be behaving if it gave each stock’s movement the same weight regardless of size. The S&P 500 is beating that equal-weighted index on a one-year rolling basis by a wide margin, “just a whisker shy of the dot-com bubble record highs,� according to strategists at Barclays.

Unlike that bubble, though, the companies driving the growth this time are actually making profits and not flying on just hype.

“As such the investment case for continued outperformance remains intact, but arguably more vulnerable to occasional corrections, given ebullient sentiment,� according to the strategists led by Stefano Pascale and Anshul Gupta.

Along with tech stocks, cryptocurrency prices have also been running higher. Bitcoin rose above $57,000 before edging back below the threshold and is up by roughly a third so far this year already.

New exchange-traded funds that hold bitcoin have made investing in the cryptocurrency easier, while also driving business for Coinbase and others that safeguard those ETFs’ bitcoins. Coinbase rose 2.7% on Tuesday to bring its gain for the year so far to 14.5%.

Earnings reporting season is winding down for the big companies in the S&P 500, and the hope is that a remarkably solid U.S. economy will help profits grow through this year.

A report Tuesday morning showed orders for long-lasting manufactured goods were weaker last month than economists expected, but they were better than forecast after ignoring airplanes and other transportation items.

A separate report said that confidence among U.S. consumers unexpectedly slipped. Confidence had been on the upswing, and it’s a closely followed figure on Wall Street because spending by consumers makes up the bulk of the U.S. economy.

On the upside for investors, the report also showed that expectations for inflation among U.S. consumers ticked down a bit.

Treasury yields were mixed but held relatively steady after the reports. Yields have been climbing this year as traders push back forecasts for when the Federal Reserve may begin cutting interest rates.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mostly higher across Asia and Europe. Stocks jumped 1.3% in Shanghai but sank 0.8% in Seoul. Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 was little changed, remaining near its highest level in history.