Stock Market Today: Nasdaq in Correction After a 5.5 Percent Plunge and a 1,833-Point Dow Drop, as Chip Stocks Stabilize Friday
Thursday was Wall Street's worst day in more than a year and a half: the Nasdaq fell 5.5 percent into correction territory, chip stocks lost an eighth of their value, and nearly $3 trillion in market value vanished. Friday morning, the selling stopped - chip stocks bounced in premarket trading, and Asia's rout eased after trading halts.
The stock market's post-election reversal turned into a rout on Thursday. The Nasdaq Composite fell 5.5 percent to 24,315.00, its deepest one-day drop in 19 months, confirming a correction - a fall of more than 10 percent from its record high last month - and putting it on track for a fourth straight weekly decline. The S&P 500 lost 4.4 percent to close at 7,353.73, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 1,833.06 points, or 3.4 percent, to 51,523.06, and only 71 stocks in the S&P 500 managed a gain. All eleven market sectors finished lower.
Chip stocks, the engine of the artificial-intelligence build-out, took the worst of it. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 12.2 percent; Advanced Micro Devices fell 17.3 percent, Qualcomm 9.5 percent and Nvidia 9.3 percent, in a technology-led rout that Reuters reported wiped nearly $3 trillion off the market value of S&P 500 companies. The selling followed fears that Democratic control of Congress could bring tougher AI regulation and slower data-center expansion - a fight with a Texas address, since more than a quarter of the data-center capacity planned in the United States through 2030 is slated for this state, and the governor-elect has pledged to halt new construction until protective laws pass. Sen. Bernie Sanders renewed his call Thursday for a national moratorium on AI data centers.
The rout rolled through Asia overnight before easing. South Korea's Kospi fell more than 8 percent on Friday, triggering a 20-minute trading halt before recovering some ground; Japan's Nikkei fell about 6 percent and Taiwan's market more than 8 percent in early trading - snapshots, not closing results. By the U.S. premarket, the tone had flipped: Nasdaq 100 futures were up 1.48 percent in the early hours, S&P 500 futures up 0.39 percent, and the beaten-down chip names were bouncing - Nvidia up 3.6 percent, with AMD, Intel, Broadcom and Micron up between 5 and 8.3 percent. The market's fear gauge, the VIX, was down slightly at 26.07 after its biggest one-day jump in about 19 months. Whether the bounce holds now turns on Friday's data and the December Federal Reserve meeting, for which traders are pricing better than a 65 percent chance of a rate hike.
