Trading on Wall Street was mixed in premarket Tuesday as earnings season kicks off with the latest results from a handful of big banks.
Futures for the S&P 500 fell 0.1% before the bell, while futures for the Dow
Jones Industrial Average inched up 0.1%. Nasdaq futures tumbled 0.6%.
Oil prices fell around 2%, even though tensions in the Middle East continued.
JPMorgan Chase shares ticked up 1.4% even after the bank missed quarterly targets. Other banks releasing results Tuesday are Citigroup, Wells Fargo and Goldman Sachs. UnitedHealth Group and Johnson & Johnson are among companies reporting from the health care sector.
Chipmakers were down again Tuesday following losses a day earlier. Nvidia, Broadcom and Qualcomm all dipped around 1% in premarket, while Micron slipped 3%.
A sell-off of chipmakers also pulled Asian markets mostly lower, with South Korea’s benchmark Kospi index sinking more than 5%.
The Kospi fell 5.5% to 6,035.35, led by semiconductor-related stocks, recovering some of its losses after it fell more than 7% intraday to below the 6,000 mark. It reached an all-time high in June after crossing 9,000, supercharged by the global artificial intelligence boom.
Samsung Electronics fell 7.4%, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix plunged 10.1%.
Investors’ unease over the AI boom has clouded prospects. Both companies’ stocks fell following reports that the latest advances made by China’s memory chipmaker CXMT could increasingly challenge Samsung Electronics, SK Hynix and Micron Technology, the world’s biggest memory chipmakers.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1.8% to 67,777.52. Chip equipment maker Tokyo Electron fell 7.2%. SoftBank Group, an OpenAI investor, lost 8.5%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng added 0.3% to 24,345.22. The Shanghai Composite index was up 0.1% to 3,800.86.
Taiwan’s Taiex fell 2%, with its leading chipmaker TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., also down 2%.
At midday in Europe, Britain's FTSE 100 rose 0.7%, France's CAC 40 was up 0.1%, while Germany's DAX climbed 0.3%.
In energy markets, Brent crude oil, the international standard, fell 1.9% to $104.62 a barrel. That is still higher than the roughly $72 per barrel in late February before the Iran war.
Benchmark U.S. crude was down 2.1% to $91.78 a barrel.
