Stocks finished mostly higher on Tuesday, with only the Dow ticking lower into negative territory, as the S&P 500 inches towards its record high of 4,238.04 reached in May. The tech heavy Nasdaq outperformed as investors slowed returned to Big Tech names as market participants searched for direction amid record high job openings for April and continued inflation concerns.
Meanwhile, the meme stock rally began to extend to other firms on Tuesday, with shares of Wendy's
Here's how the market settled on Tuesday:
S&P 500 Index
Dow Jones Industrial Average
Nasdaq Composite Index
Biden administration concludes domestic supply chain review, announces next steps:
The Biden administration announced a series of steps it plans to take to strengthen critical U.S. supply chains following President Joe Biden's interagency review of domestic supply chains launched in February.
The report's initial recommendations focus on four critical products for the U.S. economy: large capacity lithium batteries, rare earth metals, semiconductors and active pharmaceutical ingredients.
Under the administration's recommendations, the Department of Energy plans to release a 10-year plan to develop a domestic lithium battery supply chain and give $17 billion to support new R&D effort. Meanwhile, the Department of Interior will create and lead a task force to identity sites where rare earth metals can be produced and processed domestically, while the White House plans to work with the private sector to boost semiconductor manufacturing. Finally, the Department of Health and Human Services will commit $60 million for the development of novel technology to increase domestic manufacturing capacity for active pharmaceutical ingredients.
Job openings reach record high in April:
U.S. job openings rose to a new record high in April, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics' report on Tuesday, totaling a more-than-expected 9.286 million. That total is the highest on record, based on data going back to 2000. April's jobs openings also rose from March's total of 8.288 million, which was upwardly revised from the 8.123 million previously reported.
The largest increases in job openings were in the accommodation and food services industries at 349,000. Other services also saw job openings rise by 115,000, while durable goods manufacturing openings increased by 78,000.
Here's how benchmarks stood shortly after market open:
S&P 500 Index: -0.12% or -5.08 points to 4,221.44
Dow Jones Industrial Average: -0.19% or -66.46 points to 34,563.78
Nasdaq Composite Index: +0.27% or +37.77 points to 13,919.49
Major Fastly internet outage turns many websites dark:
Major websites and apps around the world were down early Tuesday morning due to an internet outage at cloud service provider Fastly
Fastly reported that the firm had identified and fixed the issue later Tuesday morning, stating: "The issue has been identified and a fix has been applied. Customers may experience increased origin load as global services return."
Fastly helps improve load times for websites and provides other services to global websites, apps, and platforms.
