Stock market today: Wall Street holds steady after Target and other retailers top profit forecasts

AP Business Writer

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. stocks are holding relatively steady Wednesday after more big companies delivered profit reports that topped analysts’ expectations.

The S&P 500 was 0.5% higher in afternoon trading, a day after breaking an eight-day winning streak, its longest of the year. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 82 points, or 0.2%, as of 2:32 p.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.7% higher.

Treasury yields were easing in the bond market as investors wait for the week’s main event, which will arrive Friday. That’s when Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell will give a speech at an annual economic symposium. The hope is he’ll offer clues about how deeply and quickly the Fed will begin cutting interest rates next month after it jacked them to a two-decade high to beat inflation.

In the meantime, more companies are joining a parade to deliver what looks to be the best growth in profit for S&P 500 companies since late 2021.

Target jumped 12.4% after the retailer said an important underlying measure of sales strength for the spring came in at the high end of its expectations, as traffic increased at both its stores and online. Its profit topped analysts’ estimates, and it raised its forecast for the full year.

TJX, the company behind TJ Maxx and Marshalls, rose 5.8% after it likewise reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than expected. The retailer also raised its profit forecast for the full year and said it saw increased customer transactions at all of its divisions.

They helped offset an 11.6% drop for Macy’s. The company reported better profit than analysts expected, but its revenue fell short of forecasts. It also lowered its expected range for sales this year, due in part to “a more discriminating consumer.”

Worries have been growing about whether U.S. shoppers can keep up their spending and keep the slowing economyout of a recession. Inflation is slowing, but prices are still much higher than before the pandemic, and many U.S. households have burned through the savings they built up during that stay-at-home period.

Concerns have been particularly high for U.S. households at the lower end of the income spectrum. High interest rates instituted by the Federal Reserve have made it more expensive to borrow money, compounding the difficulty.

That’s why the widespread expectation is for the Fed next month to lower its main interest rate for the first time since the COVID crash of 2020. The only question is how much and how quickly it will move.

Most Federal Reserve officials agreed last month that they would likely cut their benchmark interest rate at their next meeting in September as long as inflation continued to cool, according to minutes of the meeting released Wednesday.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury has been sinking since April on such expectations. It eased a bit further Wednesday, down to 3.76% from 3.81% late Tuesday.

A preliminary revision released by the U.S. government in the morning suggested the economy created 818,000 fewer jobs in the year through March than earlier reported. That’s a big number and adds to evidence showing a cooling job market, but it was smaller than some had feared.

“We have long warned that the jobs numbers were unreliable and subject to dramatic revision,” said Nancy Tengler, chief executive of Laffer Tengler Investments. “No investment decisions should be made on these numbers.”

She’s instead focusing on the longer term and said rising U.S. worker productivity is an encouraging signal for the economy.

On Wall Street, coal companies Arch Resources and Consol Energy both climbed after they said they were combining in an all-stock “merger of equals.” After merging, they plan to go by a new name, Core Natural Resources. Arch Resources added 0.2%, and Consol Energy gained 3%.

In stock markets abroad, indexes were mixed. Japan’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.3%. It was a much more modest move than some of its huge swings in recent weeks, including its worst day since the Black Monday crash of 1987.

Indexes were mixed elsewhere in Asia and Europe.

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AP Business Writers Yuri Kageyama, Matt Ott and Alex Veiga contributed.