Stocks fell Wednesday as market participants reacted to the Federal Reserve's first policy decision of the year, where policymakers held interest rates unchanged. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost over 100 points, while the S&P 500 Index and Nasdaq Composite fell about 0.5% each as Nvidia
Here's how the market settled on Wednesday:
S&P 500 Index
Dow Jones Industrial Average
Nasdaq Composite Index
The Federal Reserve held its target fed funds rate unchanged at a range of 4.25% to 4.50% on Wednesday, in a move largely expected by Wall Street. Policymakers notably were concerned that inflation remains "somewhat elevated," in their decision, ending its rate cutting campaign that lasted for three consecutive sessions.
Fed Chair Jerome Powell said Wednesday following the January decision that the central bank needs to see "real progress on inflation or some weakness in the labor market before we consider making adjustments."
"With our policy stance significantly less restrictive than it had been, and the economy remaining strong, we do not need to be in a hurry to adjust our policy stance," Powell added.
When asked about the potential effects of tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, Powell said, "the range of possibilities is very, very wide."
"We don't know for how long or how much, what countries. We don't know about retaliation. We don't know how it's going to transmit through the economy to consumers. That really does remain to be seen," Powell continued. "The best we can do is what we've done, which is study up on this and look at the historical experience, read the literature and think about the factors that might matter."
In the News:
Chinese tech giant Alibaba
"We have been building Qwen2.5-Max, a large MoE LLM pretrained on massive data and post-trained with curated SFT and RLHF recipes," Qwen said in a post on X. "It achieves competitive performance against the top-tier models, and outcompetes DeepSeek V3 in benchmarks like Areena Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond."
On the Earnings Front:
ASML
When asked about the arrival of low-cost AI models like DeepSeek to the market, CEO Christophe Fouquet told CNBC in an interview Wednesday: "A lower cost of AI could mean more applications. More applications means more demand over time. We see that as an opportunity for more chips demand."
Starbucks
Same-store sales fell 4%, as traffic declined 6% across its global stores. U.S. same-store sales also slid 4% as traffic decreased 8%. However, both its U.S. and international markets locations topped analyst expectations. For China, its second-largest market, same-store sales declined 6%, as the average ticket sale fell 4% during the quarter as Starbucks offered Chinese customers discounts to compete with lower prices from rivals.
"While we have room for improvement, we're making progress as planned, and have confidence we're on the right track," CEO Brian Niccol said in a video statement posted on Starbuck's website on Tuesday.
For Wednesday:
Market participants will turn their attention towards quarterly earnings from megacap companies such as Meta Platforms
