Two of the major stock indexes fell on Thursday after hitting record highs earlier in the session. Nvidia’s ( NVDA ) record rise — which catapulted it to the title of the world’s most valuable public company — also took a breather.
The S&P 500 (^GSPC) lost about 0.2% after briefly passing 5,500 for the first time, as the index failed to rally to its 31st record close of the year. The Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) touched new highs early in the session, but closed sharply lower, almost 0.8%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) rose roughly 0.7%, or about 300 points.
After Wednesday’s break, Wall Street looked to continue its winning ways into 2024. The stock rally story this year has been largely driven by excitement about the potential of AI, and no company has captured the collective attention like Nvidia. For a while, it looked like the AI party would continue.
But shares of the chip giant fell more than 3% on Thursday. Despite the decline, the stock is still up more than 170% so far this year.
On Tuesday Nvidia completed an unusually rapid rise to temporarily usurp Microsoft ( MSFT ) as the world’s most valuable company — just two weeks after dethroning Apple ( AAPL ) as the No. 1 company. 2 most valuable. Its rise to the top has come so quickly, Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre wrote, that some more passive investors haven’t been able to keep up.
Elsewhere on Thursday, global central banks were in focus as the Swiss National Bank cut rates for the second time this year. The Bank of England kept its key rate at a 16-year high, but signals pointed to a rate cut in the summer.
In the US, meanwhile, most traders continue to bet on a Fed rate cut by September, according to the CME FedWatch tool. The bulk of the economic data came in the form of weekly jobless claims, which showed a drop of 5,000 to 238,000 last week versus a consensus expectation of 235,000.
LIVE12 updates