By STAN CHOE AP Business Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are drifting on Wednesday, a day after leaping back within a few good days’ worth of gains from their all-time high.
The S&P 500 was down 0.2% in afternoon trading after flipping from an early, modest gain. It’s still within 4% of its record after charging higher amid hopes that the worst of the turmoil caused by President Donald Trump’s trade war may have passed. It had been roughly 20% below the mark last month.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 136 points, or 0.3%, as of 2:22 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was mostly unchanged.
The next big test for Wall Street will come after trading ends for the day, when market heavyweight Nvidia will report its latest results. Expectations are high for the bellwether of the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology. So are worries that its stock price may have run too high, even after it has largely stalled this year.
Nvidia edged up by 1.1%.
Macy’s swung between gains and losses through the morning after reporting milder drops in revenue and profit than analysts expected for the latest quarter. The retailer also maintained its forecast for revenue this year, but it cut its profit forecast in part because of tariffs and some moderation of spending by consumers.
Its stock was most recently up 0.8%.
Several other retailers also delivered better-than-expected results for the latest quarter in the morning. Abercrombie & Fitch soared 15.3% after its profit and revenue both topped analysts’ expectations. CEO Fran Horowitz credited broad-based growth across its business around the world, and strength for its Hollister brand offset weakness for its Abercrombie brand.
Dick’s Sporting Goods added 1.8% after it likewise topped analysts’ expectations for the latest quarter, and it stood by its financial forecasts it earlier gave for the full year.
On the losing end of Wall Street was Okta, which fell 14.5% even though the identity and access management company reported better results for the latest quarter than Wall Street expected. Analysts called it a solid performance, but investors may have been looking for even more after its stock came into the day up nearly 60% for the year so far.
Video-game retailer GameStop fell 8.6% after saying it had bought 4,710 bitcoin, which is worth more than $510 million at its current price. The company said in late March that it could begin buying bitcoin to store some of the cash in its treasury.
The Federal Reserve released the minutes from its meeting earlier this month, when it left its benchmark lending rate alone for the third straight time. The central bank is worried about inflation proving to be more persistent than anticipated amid Trump’s sweeping tariffs.
In stock markets abroad, indexes were modestly lower across much of Europe and Asia.
South Korea was an exception, where the Kospi jumped 1.3% thanks in part to gains for Samsung Electronics and other tech companies.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 4.48% from 4.43% late Tuesday.
Sharp swings in the bond market last week rattled investors after Treasury yields jumped in part on worries about the U.S. government’s rapidly rising debt levels. Such worries have also hit Japan, where a Wednesday auction of 40-year Japanese government bonds drew less interest from potential buyers than it’s seen since since July.
After years of pumping money into the economy through hefty bond purchases, Japan’s central bank has been gradually cutting back, undermining demand at a time when other institutional investors also have been buying fewer Japanese government bonds.
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AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
