The US stock market fell after another jarring day, as worries keep dogging Nvidia, bitcoin and other Wall Street stars that their prices shot too high.
After quickly sliding to a morning loss of 1.5 per cent, the S&P 500 clawed back nearly all of it before sinking again.
It finished with a fall of 0.8 per cent and pulled further from its all-time high set late last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 498 points, or 1.1 per cent, and the Nasdaq composite sank 1.2 per cent.
The shaky finish on Wall Street was felt in the Australian share market, which fell at the opening of trade before steadying to go up 0.5 per cent up at midday.
In the US, Nvidia was again the heaviest weight on the market, and its drop of 2.8 per cent brought its loss for the month so far to more than 10 per cent.
That’s a steep enough fall that Wall Street has a name for it: a correction.
What Nvidia does matters disproportionately to savers’ 401(k) accounts because its immense size means it’s the most influential stock on Wall Street. Those 401(k) accounts are the equivalent of Australia’s superannuation funds.
It single-handedly steers the direction of the S&P 500 some days, after fervent demand for its artificial-intelligence chips helped it briefly top $5 trillion in total value.
The US stock market’s recent struggles are a sharp turnaround from its nearly relentless rally since April, when Wall Street last sold off after President Donald Trump shocked the world with stiff tariffs.
That rally was so strong that critics say it may have carried prices too high, too fast and left the market at risk of a sharp drop.
They point in particular to stocks swept up in the AI mania, which have been surging at spectacular speeds for years.
Nvidia’s price more than doubled in four of the last five years, for example, while Palantir Technologies’ stock more than doubled in the first six and a half months of this year.
Many big investors still seem to expect stock prices to rise further, according to the latest monthly survey of global fund managers by Bank of America Global Research.
But when asked what the No. 1 risk for the market is, one with a lower probability of happening but a chance of very big damage, 45 per cent pointed to an AI bubble.
That beat out potential trouble in the bond market, inflation and trade wars.
A record percentage of investors is also saying companies are “overinvesting,” according to the survey.
The worry is that all the dollars pouring into AI chips and data centers worldwide may not produce the kind of revolution that AI proponents have been predicting, or at least not as profitable a one.
Other high-flying areas of the market with their own evangelists have also been struggling lately.
Bitcoin’s price briefly fell below $US90,000 ($138,000) in the morning, down from nearly $US125,000 last month. It later recovered some of its losses and climbed back toward $US93,000.
Home Depot also dragged the market lower after falling 6 per cent.
It reported a weaker profit for the summer than analysts expected and cited a variety of reasons.
Chief among them was a lack of storms, which would have driven customers to buy more home-improvement supplies.
Home Depot chief executive Ted Decker also pointed to “consumer uncertainty and continued pressure in housing” for preventing an expected increase in demand.
Reporting stronger profits is one of the ways a company can make its stock price look less expensive, because stock prices tend to track with earnings over the long term.
That’s raising the stakes for tomorrow’s profit report from Nvidia, which could either help halt its stock’s slide or worsen it.
Elsewhere on Wall Street, Cloudflare fell 2.8 per cent after an earlier issue at the internet infrastructure provider caused global outages for ChatGPT and other services.
All told, the S&P 500 fell 55.09 points to 6,617.32.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 498.50 to 46,091.74, and the Nasdaq composite sank 275.23 to 22,432.85.
In the bond market, Treasury yields likewise oscillated through the day.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury eventually eased to 4.11 per cent from 4.13 per cent late Monday.
Yields have been swinging amid doubts about whether the Federal Reserve will cut its main interest rate at its next meeting in December, something that traders had earlier seen as very likely.
What the Fed does is critical for the market because stock prices ran to records in part because of expectations for continued cuts to rates.
The Fed has cut rates twice already this year in hopes of shoring up a slowing job market.
But lower interest rates can make inflation worse, and inflation has stubbornly remained above the Fed’s two per cent target.
In stock markets abroad, indexes tumbled across Europe and Asia.
South Korea’s Kospi sank 3.3 per cent, Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 3.2 per cent and France’s CAC 40 fell 1.9 per cent for some of the world’s larger drops.
