US stock indexes are drifting lower on Wednesday as Wall Street takes a pause from what seemed like a relentless rally.
The S&P 500 fell 0.3 per cent in afternoon trading, coming off its first loss in four days. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 85 points, or 0.2 per cent, in mid-afternoon trade, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.4 per cent lower. All three are still near their all-time highs, which were set on Monday.
Wall Street has lost more ground.Credit: Bloomberg
The Australian sharemarket is set to decline, with futures at 4.57am AEST pointing to a decline of 42 points, or 0.5 per cent, at the open. The ASX shed 0.9 per cent on Wednesday.
It’s a slowdown following the blistering run for the US stock market since it hit a low in April, fuelled by hopes that President Donald Trump’s tariffs won’t derail global trade and that the Federal Reserve will cut interest rates several times to boost the US economy. The big rally, though, has raised concerns that stock prices have shot too high and become too expensive, particularly if the Fed does not deliver as many cuts to rates as traders expect.
Demonstrating the weight of high expectations, Micron Technology’s stock fell 4.3 per cent even though it reported a better profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. The maker of computer memory also gave a forecast for profit in the current quarter that blew past analysts’ expectations.
Typically, such a performance would send a stock higher. But Micron’s stock came into the day with an atypical, stunning gain of 97.7 per cent for the year so far.
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Freeport-McMoRan sank 14.8 per cent for one of the market’s larger losses after the miner said it expects sales of copper to be 4 per cent lower in the third quarter than it had earlier forecast. It also said sales of gold will likely be roughly 6 per cent lower than earlier expected.
On the winning side of Wall Street was Lithium Americas. It soared 98.3 per cent following reports that the US government is considering taking an ownership stake in the Canadian company, which is developing a lithium project in Nevada with General Motors.
