Anders Bylund, The Motley Fool
4 min read
Wall Street is saving its energy for Wednesday morning’s inflation report, which should decide where this calm market goes next. Meanwhile, the top stock market indexes look pretty quiet again.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJINDICES: ^DJI) is down 0.08%, the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC) has given up 0.12%, and the Nasdaq Composite (NASDAQINDEX: ^IXIC) is off by 0.32%. The Dow got out to a 0.4% lead early and spent the rest of the morning giving it back, while the Nasdaq never really got going. None of the moves is particularly large.
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Oil climbs while Alphabet and Amazon drag
Energy remains the macro story to watch.
Iran restated that the Strait of Hormuz will remain shut until its conditions are met, including sanctions relief and compensation. President Trump answered by demanding 50 years of reparations. Those two positions are not particularly compatible, and oil prices edged higher in response. West Texas Intermediate crude rose about 1.4% past $83 per barrel, and the United States Oil Fund (NYSEMKT: USO) gained 0.9%.
Two mega-caps account for most of the index’s downdraft today. Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) fell 2.2%, subtracting roughly 47 Dow points and 0.17 percentage points from the Nasdaq Composite. Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) matched that 2.2% drop, taking another 0.12 points off that index. Together, they account for nearly the entire 0.32% Nasdaq decline. Neither company reported major news this morning, and their moves were still low-single-digit market noise.
Memory chips are a mixed bag. Micron Technology (NASDAQ: MU) chief business officer Sumit Sadana spoke at KeyBanc’s tech conference on Monday, saying the memory shortage will extend well past 2027. Customer demand signals have climbed since the last earnings report, and data center buyers often cannot get even half of the DRAM they request.
That’s from an industry where the leading names run their own chip manufacturing lines rather than relying on third-party foundries. Memory makers aren’t waiting in line for manufacturing capacity.
Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), meanwhile, is reportedly considering using less high-bandwidth memory in a forthcoming chip design to protect its margins. That story moved markets yesterday.
