Wall Street drifts lower after a morning gain evaporates #CanadaFinance

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stock indexes are drifting lower Wednesday after climbing in the morning but then running out of momentum.

The S&P 500 was down 0.3% in late trading after surrendering an early gain of 0.9%. It’s coming off a four-day losing streak that knocked Wall Street off its all-time high.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 243 points, or 0.6%, with a little less than an hour remaining in trading, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.2% lower.

Advance Auto Parts tumbled 19% after the retailer said it made less profit out of each $1 of revenue during the latest quarter than a year earlier, in part because of liquidation sales at stores it closed. Apple, meanwhile, was the heaviest weight on the S&P 500 after dropping 3%.

The stock market has generally been struggling following some weaker-than-expected reports on the economy, including a couple that showed U.S. households are getting more pessimistic about inflation and tariffs pushed by President Donald Trump. Some of the harshest drops hit Big Tech and other high-growth stocks, whose incredible momentum had earlier seemed unstoppable.

Super Micro Computer, one of the stocks that’s soared in the frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology, lost nearly a quarter of its value over four days, for example. But it jumped 12.3% Wednesday after filing its annual report for its fiscal year that ended in June.

The company, which sells servers used in AI and other computing, had delayed filing its annual report and other required forms after its former accounting firm raised concerns about some of its financial reporting and governance. Super Micro then had to get extensions from Nasdaq to file the financial reports as it conducted a review and hired another public accounting firm.

General Motors revved up by 3.7% for another one of the market’s bigger gains after the automaker announced a program to buy back up to $6 billion of its stock. It will also send more cash to its shareholders by increasing its dividend.

Much of the market’s attention remained on Nvidia, the chip company that’s become the poster child of the AI rush. It rose 2.3% ahead of its latest profit report, which is due after trading ends for the day.

It will be the first earnings report for the company and its CEO, Jensen Huang, since a Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, upended the AI industry by saying it developed a large language model that can compete with big U.S. rivals without having to use the most expensive chips. That called into question all the spending Wall Street had assumed would go into not only Nvidia’s chips but also the ecosystem that’s built around the AI boom, including electricity to power large data centers.

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