Trading on Wall Street was mixed in premarket Tuesday as earnings season kicks off with the latest results from a handful of big banks.
Futures for the S&P 500 fell 0.1 per cent before the bell, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average inched up 0.1 per cent. Nasdaq futures tumbled 0.6 per cent.
Oil prices fell around 2 per cent, even though tensions in the Middle East continued.
JPMorgan Chase shares ticked up 1.4 per cent even after the bank missed quarterly targets. Other banks releasing results Tuesday are Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. UnitedHealth Group and Johnson & Johnson are among companies reporting from the health care sector.
Chipmakers were down again Tuesday following losses a day earlier. Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm all dipped around 1 per cent in premarket, while Micron slipped 3 per cent.
A sell-off of chipmakers also pulled Asian markets mostly lower, with South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index sinking more than 5 per cent.
The Kospi fell 5.5 per cent to 6,035.35, led by semiconductor-related stocks, recovering some of its losses after it fell more than 7 per cent intraday to below the 6,000 mark. It reached an all-time high in June after crossing 9,000, supercharged by the global artificial intelligence boom.
Samsung Electronics fell 7.4 per cent, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix plunged 10.1 per cent.
Investors’ unease over the AI boom has clouded prospects. Both companies’ stocks fell following reports that the latest advances made by China’s memory chipmaker CXMT could increasingly challenge Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology, the world’s biggest memory chipmakers.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1.8 per cent to 67,777.52. Chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron fell 7.2 per cent. SoftBank Group, an OpenAI investor, lost 8.5 per cent.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng added 0.3 per cent to 24,345.22. The Shanghai Composite index was up 0.1 per cent to 3,800.86.
Taiwan’s Taiex fell 2 per cent, with its leading chipmaker TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., also down 2 per cent.
At midday in Europe, Britain’s FTSE 100 rose 0.7 per cent, France’s CAC 40 was up 0.1 per cent, while Germany’s DAX climbed 0.3 per cent.
In energy markets, Brent crude oil, the international standard, fell 1.9 per cent to $104.62 a barrel. That is still higher than the roughly $72 per barrel in late February before the Iran war.
Benchmark U.S. crude was down 2.1 per cent to $91.78 a barrel.
Chan Ho-Him and Matt Ott, The Associated Press
