By Joe Woelfel
Stocks fell Wednesday, pressured by the continued rise in bond yields on inflation fears.
These stocks were making moves Wednesday:
Nvidia was down 0.8% after tumbling 6.2% on Tuesday, the stock's worst one-day percentage drop since a 9.5% decline on Sept. 3, 2024. Investors were disappointed CEO Jensen Huang provided relatively few details about the company's most lucrative business of providing chips to train and run artificial-intelligence models in his keynote address at the CES tech trade show on Monday. Benchmark Research analyst Cody Acree also noted how Huang failed to discuss some progress with Nvidia's next-generation GPU platform, Rubin.
Advanced Micro Devices fell 5.1% to $120.82 after HSBC analysts downgraded shares of the semiconductor company to Reduce from Buy with a price target of $110. The analysts said AMD's roadmap for producing AI graphics processors "is less competitive than we previously thought."
Palantir Technologies, a maker of AI software, was down 3.9% to $67.26. It dropped 7.8% on Tuesday, Palantir's worst single-day percentage drop since May 7, 2024. Three exchange-traded funds run by Cathie Wood's ARK Investment Management disclosed late Monday they unloaded a combined 196,728 shares of Palantir, and sold another 4,890 shares on Tuesday.
Shares of electric-vehicle maker Tesla fell 0.8%. The stock fell 4.1% on Tuesday after BofA Securities analyst John Murphy downgraded Tesla to Hold from Buy. Meanwhile, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration opened an investigation into Tesla's new " Actually Smart Summon" feature, which allows a Tesla owner to have his car drive itself to him in a parking lot.
Quantum-computing stocks such as D-Wave Quantum, off 43%; Quantum Computing, down 47%; Rigetti Computing, down 48%; and IonQ, down 43%, tumbled after Nvidia's Huang said "very useful" quantum computers won't be viable for 15 to 30 years. "If you kind of said 15 years for very useful quantum computers, that would probably be on the early side. If you said 30, it's probably on the late side," Huang said in a Q&A session during Nvidia's analyst day. "If you picked 20, I think a whole bunch of us would believe it."
EBay jumped 8.6%. Meta Platforms will let some users browse eBay listings on its Facebook Marketplace platform following a European Union ruling. Meta last year was fined EUR797.72 million by the European Commission for breaching EU antitrust rules by tying Facebook Marketplace to Facebook and "by imposing unfair trading conditions on other online classified ads service providers."
Vir Biotechnology jumped 69% after releasing promising results on a pair of experimental cancer treatments. The company said two early-stage drugs, VIR-5818 and VIR-5500, showed "compelling early clinical response signals" in an early trial in patients with various solid tumor cancers.
Shares of Moderna were down 8.3%, following Tuesday's gains of 12%. The vaccine maker is one of a few drug companies currently developing a vaccine for the H5N1 bird flu. The first bird flu death was reported in the U.S. earlier this week.
Edison International was down 12% as wildfires raged across Los Angeles. The utility's subsidiary, Southern California Edison, serves the area.
Constellation Energy was falling 10% following a report from Bloomberg that said the company was nearing a deal to buy Calpine, the private power plant operator, that would value Calpine at about $30 billion, including debt.
SolarEdge Technologies declined 13% to $15.36. Citi analysts downgraded shares of the energy technology company to Sell from Neutral and cut their price target to $9 from $12. Citi cited SolarEdge's "tight liquidity, challenging earnings outlook, and competition."
Cal-Maine Foods, the egg producer, reported fiscal second-quarter earnings and revenue that beat analysts' estimates on holiday demand and higher egg prices, which the company said, "have continued to rise this fiscal year as supply levels of shell eggs have been restricted due to recent outbreaks of highly pathogenic avian influenza." The stock rose 2.2%.
Write to Joe Woelfel at joseph.woelfel@barrons.com
This content was created by Barron's, which is operated by Dow Jones & Co. Barron's is published independently from Dow Jones Newswires and The Wall Street Journal.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 08, 2025 12:53 ET (17:53 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2025 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
