
Wall Street waves amid mixed earnings, crude slides as trade deadline looms
NEW YORK (REUTERS)Wall Street gyrated lower and crude lost ground on Tuesday as investors faced a spate of extended mixed earnings, with little progress to show for ongoing talks between the United States and its trading partners.The S&P 500 was modestly lower while easing tech shares dragged the Nasdaq into a steeper loss. The blue-chip Dow held on to nominal gains.Gold extended its gain in opposition to the softening dollar and US Treasury yields eased for the third straight session.'(Investors are) looking for additional catalysts and you're seeing some cautious comments coming out of companies,' said Robert Pavlik, senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth in Fairfield, Connecticut. "They're hearing mixed guidance when it comes to all this uncertainty revolving around tariffs and the direction things are heading in."Second-quarter earnings season has hit full-stride, with nearly one-fifth of the companies in the S&P 500 having reported. Of those, 79% have beaten analyst expectations, according to LSEG data.Analysts now expect year-on-year S&P 500 earnings growth of 7.0%, on aggregate, a sizable improvement over the 5.8% growth predicted as of July 1, per LSEG.Still, the effects of trade war have begun seeping into corporate results.General Motors' GM.N second-quarter core profit slid by 32% as steep tariff costs took a $1.1 billion bite from its bottom line. Prospects of a US-European Union trade deal appeared to be fading as Washington's August 1 deadline loomed, prompting EU members to ramp up possible "anti-coercion" retaliatory measures.The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 38.96 points, or 0.09%, to 44,362.03, the S&P 500 fell 6.29 points, or 0.10%, to 6,299.49 and the Nasdaq Composite fell 89.48 points, or 0.43%, to 20,883.37.European shares sagged under the weight of disappointing earnings and looming worries over the lack of progress in US trade negotiations. MSCI's gauge of stocks across the globe fell 0.80 points, or 0.08%, to 928.84. The pan-European STOXX 600 index fell 0.47%, while Europe's broad FTSEurofirst 300 index fell 9.88 points, or 0.47%.Emerging market stocks fell 3.99 points, or 0.32%, to 1,249.49. MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan closed lower by 0.24%, to 657.10, while Japan's Nikkei fell 44.19 points, or 0.11%, to 39,774.92.The dollar continued to edge lower amid a subdued currency market as investors awaited any sign of progress in trade talks ahead of the August 1 deadline. The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of currencies including the yen and the euro, fell 0.28% to 97.57, with the euro up 0.22% at $1.1722.Bitcoin resumed its upward climb. In cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin gained 1.82% to $119,134.52. Ethereum declined 1.4% to $3,706.19.Oil prices weakened on growing worries over softening demand as the August 1 tariff deadline drew closer. US crude fell 1.56% to $66.15 a barrel and Brent fell to $68.26 per barrel, down 1.37% on the day. Gold prices Spot gold rose 0.9% to $3,425.89 an ounce.
US gold futures rose 0.58% to $3,421.70 an ounce.
Hashtags

Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles


Al Etihad
an hour ago
- Al Etihad
Meta narrows annual capital expenditures outlook for 'superintelligence' push
31 July 2025 00:16 (REUTERS)Meta Platforms narrowed its annual capital expenditures forecast on Wednesday, driven by the social media giant's high-stakes push for "superintelligence" as the artificial intelligence arms race intensifies in Silicon Facebook and Instagram parent now expects capital expenditures to be between $66 billion and $72 billion, compared with its prior projection of $64 billion and $72 move follows a similar announcement by Big Tech rival Alphabet, which last week raised its capital spending outlook by $10 billion to $85 billion on the back of strong AI-driven growth in its search and cloud and deploying advanced AI systems remain a capital-intensive endeavor, requiring costly hardware, massive computing resources, and top-tier engineering a lackluster reception for its Llama 4 model that led to staff departures, Meta has tried to revitalise its AI push by sparking a high-stakes talent war that has seen it dole out more than $100 million pay packages to researchers from rival Mark Zuckerberg has pledged to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to build massive AI data centres, having shelled out $14.3 billion for a stake in startup Scale AI and poached its 28-year-old billionaire CEO Alexandr fund the push, the billionaire founder is leaning on Meta's massive user base, as well as AI-powered improvements in content engagement that make it a stable bet for advertisers even in times of economic social media giant recently introduced an AI-driven image-to-video ad creation tool under its Advantage+ suite, allowing marketers to generate video ads from static whose Reels product competes with ByteDance's TikTok and YouTube Shorts for ad dollars in the popular short video format, is set to account for more than half of Meta's ad revenue in the US this year, according to research firm has also accelerated efforts to monetise its social media platforms WhatsApp and Threads by integrating ads. The company last month named insider Connor Hayes as head of Threads, a sign it was moving the platform away from Instagram's shadow after leaning on the photo-sharing app for growth.


Al Etihad
an hour ago
- Al Etihad
US Federal Reserve leaves interest rates unchanged, warns about slowing economic growth
31 July 2025 00:27 WASHINGTON (REUTERS)The US Federal Reserve held interest rates steady on Wednesday in a split decision that gave little indication of when borrowing costs might be lowered."The unemployment rate remains low, and labour market conditions remain solid. Inflation remains somewhat elevated," the central bank said in a policy statement released after the Federal Open Market Committee voted 9-2 to keep its benchmark overnight interest rate steady in the 4.25%-4.50% range for the fifth consecutive policy statement did note that economic growth "moderated in the first half of the year," possibly bolstering the case to lower rates at a future meeting should that trend it also said that "uncertainty about the economic outlook remains elevated", with risks to both the Fed's inflation and employment goals, language that has anchored the central bank's reluctance to cut rates until the path of inflation and jobs becomes clearer. This week's meeting marks the first time in more than 30 years that two members of the Fed's seven-person Washington-based Board of Governors voted against a rate decision at the consensus-driven central bank.


Al Etihad
an hour ago
- Al Etihad
TikTok launches crowd-sourced debunking tool in US
31 July 2025 00:35 WASHINGTON (AFP)TikTok on Wednesday rolled out a crowd-sourced debunking system in the United States, becoming the latest tech platform to adopt a community-driven approach to combating online a feature that the popular video-sharing app began testing in April, allows vetted users to suggest written context for content that might be wrong or misleading -- similar to Community Notes on Meta and X."Footnotes draws on the collective knowledge of the TikTok community by allowing people to add relevant information to content," Adam Presser, the platform's head of operations and trust and safety, said in a blog post."Starting today, US users in the Footnotes pilot program can start to write and rate footnotes on short videos, and our US community will begin to see the ones rated as helpful -- and rate them, too," he said nearly 80,000 US-based users, who have maintained an account for at least six months, have qualified as Footnotes contributors. The video-sharing app has some 170 million US said the feature will augment the platform's existing integrity measures such as labelling content that cannot be verified and partnering with fact-checking organisations, such as AFP, to assess the accuracy of posts on the cautioned it may take some time for a footnote to become public, as contributors get started and become more familiar with the platforms increasingly view the community-driven model as an alternative to professional fact-checking. Earlier this year, Meta ended its third-party fact-checking program in the US, with chief executive Mark Zuckerberg saying it had led to "too much censorship." As an alternative, Zuckerberg said Meta's platforms, Facebook and Instagram, would use "Community Notes".