Stocks were mixed Thursday afternoon as investors await updates on the ongoing debt ceiling debate and quarterly earnings from Walmart (WMT) highlighted the resilience of American consumers.
The S&P 500 (^GSPC) rose 0.40%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) lost 86 points, or 0.25%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) rose 1.10%.
President Joe Biden traveled to Asia on Wednesday with no debt ceiling plan but enough optimism to propel stocks higher on Wednesday. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy told reporters that Wednesday’s discussion “set the stage for further talks to proceed.”
“We are beginning to see enough common themes in their views to be confident that a deal will be announced in a relatively short period of time,” Thomas Simmons, US economist at Jefferies, wrote in a note on Wednesday. “Given the Treasury Department’s X-date warnings on June 1 and the time it will take for the legislative process to be implemented, we could see an announcement of a framework as early as Sunday if Biden returns from his trip to Japan to the G- 7 meeting returns.” .”
Meanwhile, shares of Walmart (WMT) rose less than 1% in early trade as America’s largest retailer reported stronger same-store sales growth than Wall Street had expected. Walmart also raised its guidance for full-year adjusted earnings per share to $6.10-$6.20 from $5.90-$6.05.
Shares in Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba (BABA) fell more than 3% on Thursday afternoon after the company reported mixed quarterly results compared to Wall Street expectations. The company also announced that it has approved the spin-off of its cloud business.
The report comes after several consumer warnings, particularly around discretionary spending, were issued by companies including Home Deport (HD) and Target (TGT) earlier in the week.
Elsewhere, shares of Netflix (NFLX) rose more than 10% after the streaming giant announced its ad tier had five million monthly active users.
The story goes on
On the economic front, investors have been paying close attention to the clues to the Federal Reserve’s next interest rate decision. While markets had priced in a more than 75 percent chance of a pause in rate hikes at Thursday’s June Fed meeting, Dallas Fed Chair Lorie Logan struck a more hawkish tone.
“Data for the coming weeks may yet show that it is appropriate to skip a session. To date, however, we’re not there,” Logan said in a speech to bankers in San Antonio.
Weekly jobless claims came in lower than expected. The US Department of Labor reported 242,000 applications for the week of May 13th. Economists polled by Bloomberg had expected 251,000. The week before, jobless claims were 264,000. Thursday’s drop marked the biggest weekly drop in US jobless claims since 2021. The drop came after reports suggested fraud was pushing up Massachusetts numbers.
Existing home sales fell 3.4% in April. According to Bloomberg consensus data, the 4.28 million existing home sales were below the 4.3 million economists had forecast. 4.43 million existing properties were sold in March.
Josh is a reporter for Yahoo Finance.
Click here for the latest stock market news and in-depth analysis, including stock moving events
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance