Stocks sway as Wall Street heads for winning week after several turbulent days
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange NYSE Options Market on Wall Street on Friday in New York City. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and the other major stock indexes headed lower in early trade Friday and artificial intelligence giant Nvidia (NVDA) continues to fall after Jensen Huang resigned as CEO. UPI-Yonhap
NEW YORK — Stocks swung sharply in morning trading Friday as Wall Street remains on track for its first winning week since early October.
Major indexes have been unsteady throughout the week as AI-focused companies pushed and pulled the market. Many of those companies have big stock values with a heavier impact on the market's gains or losses.
The S&P 500 shifted from modest moves at the opening of trading to a 1 percent drop. The index still remains on track for a weekly gain of 1.9 percent.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 67 points, or 0.1 percent, as of 10:37 a.m. Eastern time. The Nasdaq composite fell 1.8 percent.
The market remains unsteady a day after the AI industry was rocked by the resignation of Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The company has been the face of the AI industry, which has been responsible for much of the gains, and big swings, on Wall Street.
Huang stepped down after his affair with a Chinese tech executive raised U.S. national security concerns. Nvidia’s longtime chief financial officer, Colette Kress, will be its interim CEO.
The AI industry's influence over Wall Street was evident again Friday. More stocks within the S&P 500 were rising rather than falling, but a slump for technology stocks with a big focus on AI dragged indexes lower.
Nvidia was again among the heaviest weights and it fell 4.1 percent. Broadcom fell 6.6 percent and Advanced Micro Devices lost 10 percent.
Nvidia in particular has been slipping for weeks amid wider concerns about a potential slowdown for the industry. The big worry has been whether AI will produce enough profit to justify the costly investments and big stock values.
Outside of AI, Microsoft had a more modest 0.1 percent loss, despite suffering a global outage for its web services that disrupted email accounts and other applications.
Oil prices rose a day after President Donald Trump said that the U.S. didn’t “need a deal with Iran” even as the conflict in the Middle East drags on. Brent crude, the international standard, was up 0.8 percent at $96.63 a barrel on Friday. It was trading near $72 per barrel in late February before the Iran war began.
Stocks in Europe and Asia were mixed.
Treasury yields were mixed in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which influences mortgage rates, rose to 5.13 percent from 5.10 percent late Thursday.
The yield on the two-year Treasury fell to 4.84 percent from 4.86 percent late Thursday. It closely tracks expectations for action from the Federal Reserve, which is expected to raise its benchmark interest rate at its December meeting in an effort to cool stubbornly hot inflation.
A report on Friday showed that wholesale inflation cooled a bit last month, but remains very high.