Dow Absorbs Disruptions, Adds 370 Points: Stock Market Today

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Stocks were positive on Tuesday with President Donald Trump prepared to deliver an annual address mandated by the U.S. Constitution and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on deck to report quarterly results as required by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Markets will heed the former on tariffs and trade, the latter on the AI revolution. Investors, traders and speculators, in a buying mood, bid up nine of 11 sectors.

Markets set aside the debate about whether we're in a constructive AI boom or a destructive AI bubble ahead of Nvidia's (NVDA, +0.7%) turn on the earnings calendar after Wednesday's closing bell. We're following the market-moving event on our live Nvidia earnings blog.

Salesforce (CRM, +4.1%) and International Business Machines (IBM, +2.7%) led the 30 Dow Jones stocks, as AI-related names attracted bargain-hunters. Goldman Sachs (GS, +1.1%) and Visa (V, +0.2%) recovered from Monday's sell-off for financial stocks, though JPMorgan Chase (JPM, -0.1%) and American Express (AXP, -0.3%) struggled again.

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The word from the economic calendar was positive, too, though also with caveats. The Conference Board's Consumer Confidence Index rebounded to 91.2 in February from an upwardly revised 89.0 in January, as feelings about the present got worse but perspectives on the future got better.

Four of five components of the index improved, The Conference Board Chief Economist Dana M. Peterson said. "Nonetheless," Peterson noted, "the measure remained well below the four-year peak achieved in November 2024 (112.8)."

At the closing bell, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.8% to 49,174, the broad-based S&P 500 had added 0.8% at 6,890, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was higher by 1.0% to 22,863.

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A foundation for dividend growth

Home Depot (HD, +2.0%) led consumer discretionary stocks higher after the big-box retailer reported expectations-beating fourth-quarter results before the opening bell on Tuesday.

HD posted earnings of $2.58 per share (-14.6% year over year) on revenue of $38.2 billion (-3.8% YoY) vs a Wall Street consensus forecast for EPS of $2.53 on revenue of $38.1 billion.

"Our results were largely in-line with our expectations," CEO Ted Decker said, "reflecting the lack of storm activity in the third quarter and ongoing consumer uncertainty and pressure in housing."

Management guided to 2026 EPS growth of 0% to 4% on sales growth of 2.5% to 4.5%, and the board approved a 1.3% increase in what will be Home Depot's 156th consecutive quarterly dividend.

"Strong same-store sales drove a big EPS beat for Home Depot this past quarter," Zacks Investment Management Chief Market Strategist Brian Mulberry writes.

Mulberry notes that we've seen no major storms since Hurricane Helene in September 2024 and that homebuilding "has seemingly slowed over the past quarter." Those factors make fourth-quarter numbers "that much more impressive as Home Depot continues to gain market share."

AMD gets a $100 billion META boost

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD, +8.8%), reminding markets there are opportunities in and for semiconductor stocks apart from NVDA, announced a partnership with Meta Platforms (META, +0.3%) to scale AI infrastructure and develop "cutting-edge" AI models.

The "definitive multi-year, multi-generation" partnership agreement is focused on the purchase and deployment of AMD's MI450 graphics processing unit (GPU) to power data centers with up to 6 gigawatts of computing power over the next five years.

The potential revenue impact is more than $100 billion for AMD. AMD has also granted META warrants to buy up to 160 million AMD shares, approximately 10% of the company, for 1 cent per share. That part of the deal is only triggered if AMD stock reaches $600 per share.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su told reporters before the Tuesday morning announcement that the deal with Meta was made with Nvidia in mind. "Meta has a lot of choices," Su said. "I want to make sure that we are always a clear seat at the table when they think about what they need next."

AMD signed a similar deal with OpenAI in October. Such arrangements, "under which one company pays another company, which turns around and buys products or services from the first company," as the WSJ also notes, have been described as "circular financing" by critics.

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David Dittman is the former managing editor and chief investment strategist of Utility Forecaster, which was named one of "10 investment newsletters to read besides Buffett's" in 2015. A graduate of the University of California, San Diego, and the Villanova University School of Law, and a former stockbroker, David has been working in financial media for more than 20 years.