Stock Market Today: Wall Street Moves Inches Up Towards Bull Market Edge

NEW YORK (AP) U.S. stocks drift Tuesday amid a vacuum of market-moving data as U.S. regulators shake up the cryptocurrency world once again by file charges against another mega player in the industry.

The S&P 500 was up 0.2% during afternoon trading and is on the edge of what traders call a bull market. It’s up almost 20% from where it was in mid-October as a long-predicted recession has yet to hit and excitement around artificial intelligence helped a select group of stocks rise.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 61 points, or 0.2%, to 33,624, as of 11 a.m. Eastern Time, while the Nasdaq composite was up 0.3%.

This coming week, there are few top-tier economic reports and corporate earnings updates to help Wall Street answer its most important question. It wants to know what will happen first: a recession or inflation that falls enough to prompt the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which have risen so high that they have hurt several parts of the economy.

That’s why next week is looming big. The US government will publish its latest monthly updates on inflation and the Federal Reserve will meet on interest rate policy. The bet on Wall Street is that the Fed may hold off on raising interest rates, which would be the first time in more than a year to do so, but could resume rate hikes in July.

Some of the strongest moves came in the cryptocurrency world after the Securities and Exchange Commission charged Coinbase with operating its trading platform as an unregistered national stock exchange, broker, and clearing house.

Shares of its parent company, Coinbase Global, fell 13.8% after the SEC also accused it of being liable for some of Coinbase’s violations. Other charges focused on Coinbase’s staking-as-a-service program, where users receive payments for their crypto, almost as if they were earning interest from a traditional bank savings account.

Coinbase criticized the SEC’s approach to crypto, saying the solution is legislation that allows for fair road rules to be developed transparently and applied equally, not litigation.

The day before, the SEC has filed 13 charges against another huge crypto trading platform, Binance, and its founder. Bitcoin was at $26,000 on Tuesday, down from $27,000 on Sunday, according to CoinDesk.

Elsewhere in the markets, oil prices were mixed following gains earlier this week Saudi Arabia announced it would cut production to drive up the price of crude oil. A barrel of US crude oil was up 0.1% at $72.20. A barrel of Brent crude, the international standard, fell 0.3% to $76.48.

Both were near $120 a year ago but have fallen amid concerns about tight fuel needs in the global economy.

On the winning side of Wall Street was Gitlab, which rose 29.8% after the software development platform issued a fiscal year revenue forecast that beat analyst expectations. It also said it expects a milder loss than Wall Street had predicted as it benefits from an artificial intelligence rush.

A frenzy around AI has seen a handful of stocks make huge gains this year, including Nvidia’s 166% rise. That contributed to much of the S&P 500’s gains in 2023, but it also left critics wondering if a bubble is brewing. They also say the furor around AI may mask the weakness below the surface of the S&P 500.

While the S&P 500 is closing in on a bull market, stocks have fallen almost as much as they have risen this year, while concerns remain about declining corporate profits, still high inflation and much higher interest rates than a year ago.

To mitigate some of that criticism, many banks went up on Tuesday.

They are under pressure because the Fed’s fastest wave of rate hikes in decades has prompted some bank customers to withdraw their deposits and put them into money market funds that pay more interest. At the same time, interest rate hikes have lowered the value of bonds and other investments banks made when interest rates were low.

The pressure has led to several high-profile bank failures and prompted Wall Street to penalize stocks of other banks as it hunts for possible victims. But Zions Bancorp rose 6.7% for the biggest gain in the S&P 500. Comerica followed closely behind with a 6.3% increase.

Some of the most closely watched banks also rose, including a 7.4% jump for PacWest Bancorp.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury bond rose from 3.69% late Monday to 3.71%. It helps set rates for mortgages and other important loans.

In foreign equity markets, indices rose slightly in much of Europe.

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 gained 0.9% after government data showed Japanese wages rose 1% in April from a year earlier, but growth slowed by 1.3% from the previous months.

Australia’s S&P ASX 200 fell 1.2% to 7,129.60 Australian central bank raised its benchmark interest rate by 0.25 percentage point to 4.1% and warned that further increases could follow. That came after inflation in the January-March quarter came in stronger than expected at 6.8%.