Stock market today: Dow, S&P 500, Nasdaq slide as rising bond yields maintain pressure, tech stocks retreat

US stocks opened lower on Tuesday as concerns around inflation, the war in Iran, Federal Reserve rate hikes, and rising bond yields took their toll on investor sentiment.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) sank roughly 0.6%, while the S&P 500 (^GSPC) dropped 0.4% on the heels of back-to-back losses. The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) fell 0.5%.

The benchmark 10-year rate (^TNX), closely watched after hitting 12-month highs, continued to climb, reaching 4.64% at the market open.

Oil prices, meanwhile, pulled back, with Brent crude (BZ=F) hovering around $110 per barrel and the US benchmark WTI crude (CL=F) trading at $103 per barrel.

Today at 12:47 PM UTC

In interviews with Bloomberg on Tuesday, JPMorgan’s global chair of investment banking and the co-heads of Goldman Sachs’ international business said the uncertainty around artificial intelligence and the conflict in Iran haven’t done much to dent rosy outlooks on Wall Street.

Even as the war in Iran has stymied global energy markets, Goldman international co-head Kunal Shah said, business hasn’t slowed down.

“Even though our clients don’t have clarity, I think the good thing here is that that hasn’t actually held up activity,” Shah said. Capital deployment has remained steady, Shah and his co-head Anthony Gutman said, with opportunity in the Middle East on the other side of the war.

At the same time, as investment in the AI build-out has surged, companies have begun making the shift from theory to reality, spurring even more investment, JPMorgan’s Kevin Brunner said on Tuesday at a conference hosted by Bloomberg.

“We’ve actually gone from hype to real execution and scaling,” Brunner said, as reported by Bloomberg. “Every company here is very focused on what’s their long-term strategic narrative, and are in the early stages of doing so.”

That enthusiasm is making the M&A dealmaking market hotter, Brunner said, noting that the bank is seeing clients looking for major deals to try to get positioned ahead of the AI boom.

Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi reports:

Several things have to happen to set the stage for a summer stock market correction, Deutsche Bank strategist Henry Allen warned. To get a more pronounced sell-off in stocks, Allen said, past experience has shown it would require at least one of the following factors:

“So far, it’s tough to argue we have any of these,” Allen noted. “The closest is the point on the ‘sustained’ oil shock, as markets are increasingly pricing in a longer period of elevated oil prices. But even there, the six-month Brent future is still only just above $90 a barrel, and declining energy intensity means that a given level for oil prices doesn’t create the economic shock it used to. So unless we see a clear change in these fundamentals, then the resiliency of risk assets is not particularly remarkable, but is in keeping with the historical record of recent decades.”

Read more here.

Cloud computing companies CoreWeave (CRWV) and Nebius (NBIS) are about to have stiffer competition.

The two stocks fell around 3% after Blackstone (BX) and Google (GOOG) announced on Monday night that they’re launching a new artificial intelligence computing firm that will provide data center capacity, operations, networking, and Google Cloud's Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) as a compute-as-a-service offering.

Yahoo Finance’s David Hollerith reports that the business will give customers another way to access Google’s TPUs, in a similar fashion to cloud provider CoreWeave. Blackstone said it will make an initial $5 billion equity investment through its funds, and it expects the company’s first 500 megawatts of power to come online by 2027.

Read more here.

Today at 10:55 AM UTC

Home Depot (HD) reaffirmed its 2026 outlook as homeowners continued to invest in smaller, do-it-yourself type projects, despite a tough housing market backdrop, concerns about higher gas prices, and economic uncertainty.

“There's no question that the average consumer is feeling pressure from rising fuel costs,” CFO Richard McPhail told Yahoo Finance. “Our customer tends to have higher incomes and higher housing wealth, but they do tell us that they're feeling the impact of fuel costs.”

In the quarter, the company posted same-store sales growth of 0.6%, which slightly missed the Street’s outlook of 0.9%, per Bloomberg consensus data.

Revenue beat expectations, growing roughly 5% year over year to $41.8 billion, higher than the $41.6 billion the team posted this time last year. Adjusted earnings came in at $3.43, topping expectations of $3.41.

Read more here.

From Bloomberg:

For years, there was only one way for mom-and-pop investors to buy into Elon Musk’s vision: shares of Tesla (TSLA) Inc. That’s about to change — and it’s a serious risk for Tesla investors.

With the imminent initial public offering of Space Exploration Technologies Corp., better known as SpaceX (SPAX.PVT), the market will have an additional entry point for the “Muskonomy.”

Wall Street pros see investors’ attention and capital inevitably being siphoned away from Musk’s electric-vehicle maker and to his shiny new toy.

“This cannot be a positive for Tesla,” said Joe Gilbert, portfolio manager at Integrity Asset Management. “We believe that Musk’s focus will predominantly be lasered on SpaceX. Musk has proved to be able to balance multiple initiatives simultaneously in the past, but it feels like SpaceX is his new baby at the expense of Tesla.”

Indeed, the seemingly inherent competition between Tesla and SpaceX is a key reason why Musk is reportedly considering merging the two companies.

Read more here.

Reuters reports:

Asian shares were mixed Tuesday as uncertainty about what will happen with the Iran war roiled global markets.

Japan's benchmark Nikkei 225 (^N225) lost 0.6% in morning trading to 60,433.79, erasing initial gains after the government reported that the economy grew for the second straight quarter in January-March, mainly due to better than expected consumer spending.

South Korea’s Kospi (^KS11) sank more than 4% in early trading and was down 3.5% at 7,249.73 by midday. Shares in Samsung Electronics slipped 3.8% and SK Hynix fell 4%, tracking losses in tech shares overnight on Wall Street.

Australia's S&P/ASX 200 added 0.9% to 8,582.80. Hong Kong's Hang Seng (^HSI) climbed 0.5% to 25,811.28, while the Shanghai Composite shed 0.3% to 4,121.11.

Read more here.

Bloomberg reports:

Oil fell after President Donald Trump said he’d called off a strike on Iran planned for Tuesday following an appeal by Persian Gulf allies.

West Texas Intermediate (CL=F) for July dropped below $103 a barrel, after rising 3.3% on Monday, while Brent (BZ=F) closed above $112. Trump said in a social media post that the leaders of Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates asked “to hold off on our planned Military attack of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which was scheduled for tomorrow, in that serious negotiations are now taking place.”

Oil has rallied on uncertainty about the talks, and the possibility that the near-total closure of the Strait of Hormuz will choke off Persian Gulf energy supplies for longer. Trump has repeatedly threatened renewed military action against Iran without following through, and Tehran didn’t immediately confirm renewed discussions.

“The president’s calling off tomorrow’s ‘scheduled’ attack is a positive,” said Mark Malek, chief investment officer at Muriel Siebert & Co. “The change of plans just shows how stochastic the situation is with negotiations.”

Trump said the US is prepared to attack if an acceptable deal isn’t reached but didn’t set a deadline.

Read more here.