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 per cent drop. The index still remains on track for a weekly gain of 1.9 per cent. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 67 points, or 0.1 per cent, as of 10:37 a.m. Eastern time. The Nasdaq composite fell 1.8 per cent. 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 per cent. Broadcom fell 6.6 per cent and Advanced Micro Devices lost 10 per cent. 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 per cent loss, despite suffering a global outage for its web services that disrupted email accounts and other applications. Oil prices rose a day after U.S. 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 per cent at US$96.63 a barrel on Friday. It was trading near US$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 per cent from 5.10 per cent late Thursday. The yield on the two-year Treasury fell to 4.84 per cent from 4.86 per cent 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. ___ Damian J. Troise, The Associated Press AP Business Writers Chan Ho-Him and Michelle Chapman contributed to this report.
