Wall Street's main indexes finished higher in choppy trading on Wednesday, as investors cheered the likely easing of trade tensions between the U.S. and major trading partners.
Stocks turned positive after a report said President Donald Trump was considering a one-month delay of auto tariffs on Canada and Mexico. Equities extended gains after a White House announcement confirmed that Trump agreed to delay tariffs on some vehicles.
Market Snapshot
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 485.6 points, or 1.14%, to 43,006.59, the S&P 500 rose 64.48 points, or 1.12%, to 5,842.63 and the Nasdaq Composite rose 267.57 points, or 1.46%, to 18,552.73.
Market Movers
General Motors rose 7.2%, Ford Motor gained 5.8%, and Stellantis was up 9.2% after the Trump administration extended a one-month exemption to auto imports coming through USMCA, or the United States Mexico Canada Agreement, a trade deal Trump negotiated during his first term.
CrowdStrike Holdings posted fourth-quarter adjusted earnings and revenue that beat Wall Street estimates but the cybersecurity company’s outlooks for its fiscal first quarter and all of fiscal 2026 were well below expectations. CrowdStrike said it expects first-quarter earnings of between 64 cents and 66 cents a share, below Wall Street estimates of 95 cents. Earnings for the fiscal year were forecast at between $3.33 and to $3.45 a share, also below analysts’ calls for $4.40. The stock declined 6.3%.
Strategy stock was up 12% on Wednesday. Its decision this week to pay a quarterly cash dividend of $1.24 per share, payable on March 31, 2025, will have helped improve sentiment. Trump’s declaration that he plans a crypto reserve also put some bounce into the market.
Defense contractor AeroVironment was down 4.4% after issuing weak fiscal-year guidance. The company expects revenue of $780 million to $795 million, down from prior guidance of about $810 million and below Wall Street estimates of $820 million. Adjusted earnings were forecast at $2.92 to $3.13 a share, below analysts’ expectations of $3.43. Trump’s wavering support for Ukraine has pressured shares of AeroVironment, which is a large supplier of guided munitions to Ukraine.
Tesla was up 2.6% after the electric-vehicle maker fell 4.4% on Tuesday. It had finished lower eight of the past nine trading sessions. The issues for investors include tariffs, weak Chinese sales, and the impact of a “buyer’s strike” on the company. Data released Wednesday, meanwhile, showed that vehicle registrations fell 76% in February in Germany, Europe’s largest economy.
Shares of Nvidia rose 1.1% after the maker of artificial-intelligence chips bucked the downward trend Tuesday and closed with a gain of 1.7%. Nvidia’s market cap rose to $2.83 trillion, but that remains well off its peak market cap of $3.66 trillion on Jan. 6, according to Dow Jones Market Data. The stock has closed higher in three of the past five trading sessions.
Huntington Ingalls Industries rose 12% after Trump announced plans for the shipbuilding industry in his address Tuesday evening to a joint session of Congress. The stock had its largest percent increase on record, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
Super Micro Computer fell 0.6%. It bucked a sinking stock market to close Tuesday up 8.5%, snapping a three-session losing streak. It fell 13% on Monday on Trump’s warning that tariffs were coming and the apparent unwinding of the artificial-intelligence trade.
Palantir Technologies rose 6.8% to $90.13. Analysts at William Blair upgraded shares of the data-analytics company to Market Perform from Underperform without a price target. The analysts said the higher rating on followed “the 33% DOGE-driven selloff from $125 to $84 over the past three weeks.” William Blair said that while valuation remained “frothy with potential downside risk of greater than 40% on government contract delays, there have been positive developments.”
Moderna rose 16% after the vaccine maker disclosed that Chief Executive Stephane Bancel bought about $5 million of common stock on March 3, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Foot Locker rose 5.1% after the sneaker and athletic-wear retailer posted fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of 86 cents a share, beating analysts’ forecasts of 72 cents. The company said it expects fiscal-year adjusted profit of $1.35 to $1.65 a share, missing analysts’ calls for $1.72 at the midpoint.
Campbell’s dropped 2.9% after the packaged-food company cut its fiscal-year earnings and sales guidance. The company said its guidance doesn’t “reflect any impact from potential import tariffs by the U.S. government and potential retaliatory actions taken by other countries.”
Shares of Abercrombie & Fitch fell 9.2% after the retailer narrowly beat quarterly earnings and sales estimates but issued disappointing guidance for its fiscal first quarter and year.
Market News
Trump Weighs Agriculture Carveouts to Canada, Mexico Tariffs
President Donald Trump is considering exempting certain agricultural products from tariffs imposed on Canada and Mexico, the latest move by the administration on Wednesday to offer relief to certain sectors from the sweeping new import taxes.
Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told Bloomberg News that “everything is on the table” and she is “hopeful” that the administration could decide on providing relief for the agricultural sector.
“As far as specific exemptions and carveouts for the agriculture industry, perhaps for potash and fertilizer, et cetera — to be determined,” Rollins said Wednesday at the White House. “We trust the president’s leadership on this. I know he is hyper focused on these communities.”
OpenAI Plans to Charge up to $20,000 a Month for Specialized AI "Agents"
OpenAI may be planning to charge up to $20,000 per month for specialized AI “agents,” according to The Information.
The publication reports that OpenAI intends to launch several “agent” products tailored for different applications, including sorting and ranking sales leads and software engineering. One, a “high-income knowledge worker” agent, will reportedly be priced at $2,000 a month. Another, a software developer agent, is said to cost $10,000 a month.
OpenAI’s most expensive rumored agent, priced at the aforementioned $20,000-per-month tier, will be aimed at supporting “PhD-level research,” according to The Information.
Alibaba's New Open Source Model QwQ-32B Matches DeepSeek-R1
Qwen Team, a division of Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba developing its growing family of open-source Qwen large language models (LLMs), has introduced QwQ-32B, a new 32-billion-parameter reasoning model designed to improve performance on complex problem-solving tasks through reinforcement learning (RL).
The model is available as open-weight on Hugging Face and on ModelScope under an Apache 2.0 license. This means it’s available for commercial and research uses, so enterprises can employ it immediately to power their products and applications (even ones they charge customers to use).
