Dow Up 463 Points as Rate-Cut Odds Rise: Stock Market Today

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Stocks closed higher Wednesday as rising hopes for a September rate cut continued to lift sentiment, though the latest batch of earnings reports had two of the three main indexes finishing well off their season highs.

Another red-hot initial public offering (IPO) also kept Wall Street engaged today, with Peter Thiel-backed Bullish (BLSH) nearly doubling in its market debut.

According to CME FedWatch, futures traders are pricing in a 96% chance the Federal Reserve will lower the federal funds rate by a quarter-percentage point at its next meeting in September – up from 57% one month ago.

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And following Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's calls on Bloomberg TV for the Fed to lower by half a percentage point, the odds of a more aggressive rate cut have risen to 4.1% from zero just one day ago.

At the close, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite was up 0.1% at 21,713 and the broader S&P 500 was 0.3% higher at 6,466 – new record highs.

The blue chip Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 1.0% to 44,922 on strength in UnitedHealth Group (UNH, +3.9%) and Nike (NKE, +3.1%).

Bullish becomes the latest hot crypto stock

The IPO market remains hot as evidenced by today's market debut from Bullish, the Peter Thiel-backed crypto platform that owns CoinDesk.

After pricing the Bullish IPO at $37 per share Tuesday night – above the previous range of $32 to $33 per share – shares opened today at $90. BLSH stock hit an intraday high of $118, before settling at $68.

CoreWeave crashes on margin concerns

In other IPO news, artificial intelligence (AI) cloud company CoreWeave (CRWV) reported its quarterly results – the second time it has done so since it went public in March.

CoreWeave disclosed higher-than-expected Q2 revenue of $1.21 billion – more than triple the year-ago period – thanks to an expanded partnership with OpenAI. It also forecast third-quarter revenue that's above analysts' estimates and raised its full-year forecast.

Still, the tech stock plunged 20.8% today on concerns over its aggressive investments.

"Management emphasized that 'powered shells' and 'access to power' remain the bottleneck to AI growth and disclosed a target of exiting calendar year 2025 with more than 900 megawatts of active power," says Needham analyst Matt Calitri (Hold). This is up roughly 90% from Q2, he adds.

Calitri says that while the significant increase in capacity and associated capital expenditures "is a strong leading indicator for revenue generation," it also "serves as a margin headwind in the interim while introducing execution and supplier risk."

Cava Group slides after earnings

Elsewhere on the earnings calendar, Cava Group (CAVA) dropped 16.6% after the Mediterranean fast-casual restaurant chain missed on the top line for its second quarter.

The company also reported lower-than-anticipated same-store sales of 2.1% and cut its full-year same-store sales forecast. In addition, CAVA anticipates higher pre-opening costs for new restaurants in 2025.

"In what has proved to be a tough quarter in fast-casual, CAVA's second-quarter comps missed expectations on slower trends in June," says William Blair analyst Sharon Zackfia. "Still, two-year comp and traffic trends both accelerated sequentially against a much tougher comparison."

Zackfia maintained an Outperform (Buy) rating on the consumer discretionary stock "given robust new unit productivity and good visibility on annual EBITDA [earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization] growth of 25%-plus through 2027."

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With over a decade of experience writing about the stock market, Karee Venema is the senior investing editor at Kiplinger.com. She joined the publication in April 2021 after 10 years of working as an investing writer and columnist at a local investment research firm. In her previous role, Karee focused primarily on options trading, as well as technical, fundamental and sentiment analysis.