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Positive headlines on the war in Iran sparked an early rally in stocks on Wednesday. Nine of the 11 S&P 500 sectors closed higher, though energy was the biggest decliner as oil prices backtracked.
The main indexes hit their session highs at the open amid reports that the U.S. sent Iran a 15-point proposal to end the war. However, enthusiasm waned after headlines suggested Iran rejected the peace plan.
After being up more than 1% in early trading the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average closed with a more modest 0.7% gain at 46,429, the broader S&P 500 added 0.5% to 6,591, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rose 0.8% to 21,929.
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Front-month West Texas Intermediate crude futures, meanwhile, fell 2.2% to $90.32 per barrel.
“The markets may remain volatile for the next several weeks until earnings season begins in mid-April,” warns Paul Stanley, chief investment officer at Granite Bay Wealth Management. Once corporate results start to roll in, though, markets can “refocus back to fundamentals, the economy and AI, instead of strictly following the Iran war and the price of oil.”
In single-stock news, Meta Platforms (META, +0.3%) was in focus after CNBC said the Facebook parent is laying off “several hundred employees.” This follows a Reuters report from earlier this month that suggested Meta is preparing to cut roughly 20% of its global workforce as it ramps up spending on its artificial intelligence efforts.
Separately, a jury found that design features, including infinite scroll, on apps created by Meta and Alphabet’s (GOOGL, +0.2%) video streaming service, YouTube, were addictive and caused harm to young users.
The companies were ordered to pay a combined $3 million to the plaintiff in the bellwether case, though Meta is responsible for 70% of that figure. This amount does not include punitive damages, which the jury is still deciding on.
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Meta was also ordered to pay $375 million in civil damages in a separate trial in New Mexico, where the state’s attorney general accused the company of failing to safeguard young users against child predators and abusers.
Arm’s 16% pop is just the beginning
Arm (ARM) shares surged 16.4% today after the company said it will begin producing its own chips for AI data centers. This marks a first for the company, which has previously just licensed its chip designs to tech giants including Nvidia (NVDA, +2.0%) and Apple (AAPL, +0.4%).
“Today marks the next phase of the Arm compute platform and a defining moment for our company,” says Arm CEO Rene Haas. “With the expansion into delivering production silicon with our Arm AGI CPU, we are giving partners more choices all built on Arm’s foundation of high-performance, power-efficient computing, to support agentic AI infrastructure at global scale.”
Today’s pop lifts the chip stock’s year-to-date return to 44%, but many on Wall Street think Arm is just getting started.
Among them is Guggenheim, which lifted its price target on Arm from $201 to a Street-high $240. This represents implied upside of more than 50% to current levels.
Elsewhere, Raymond James analyst Simon Leopold upgraded Arm to Outperform from Market Perform – the equivalent of Buy and Hold, respectively – saying the shift to chipmaker will “yield strong operating profit, aid growth and add a new dimension to the strategy.”