Stocks closed mixed Wednesday, though two of the three main indexes notched new record closing highs. In focus was an encouraging reading on wholesale prices, as well as a broader rally in artificial intelligence (AI) stocks, while market participants also kept a close eye on the latest offering to hit the Street.
Ahead of the open, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said the Producer Price Index (PPI), which measures what businesses are paying suppliers for goods, fell 0.1% from July to August – coming in below economists' estimates for a 0.3% rise. Year over year, PPI was up 2.6%.
"PPI was much weaker than expected in August," says Bill Adams, chief economist for Comerica Bank, due in part to less price pressure from imported goods.
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"Other factors like lower energy prices and modest domestic demand are slowing the pass-through of tariff prices to the real economy," Adams adds.
The economist notes that today's PPI report suggests that tomorrow morning's release of the August Consumer Price Index (CPI) "will also undershoot the market consensus forecast" and "adds further support for the Fed to cut rates" at next week's meeting.
According to CME Group FedWatch, there's currently a 90% chance the central bank will lower the federal funds rate by a quarter-percentage point next Wednesday afternoon – and a 10% probability it will cut by a half-percentage point.
Oracle has its best day in 32 years after earnings
In single-stock news, Oracle (ORCL) shares surged 36% today – their best day since December 1992, when they climbed nearly 44% – after the tech giant reported earnings.
While Oracle's fiscal first-quarter earnings of $1.47 per share and revenue of $14.9 billion fell short of what analysts expected, its outlook wowed Wall Street.
"We signed four multi-billion-dollar contracts with three different customers in Q1," said Oracle CEO Safra Catz in the company's earnings release. "This resulted in RPO [remaining performance obligation] contract backlog increasing 359% to $455 billion."
Catz called it "an astonishing quarter" and said he expects Oracle Cloud Infrastructure revenue to grow 77% this fiscal year to $18 billion. Over the next four years, the company anticipates it will hit $144 billion.
"We are upgrading Oracle shares to Buy from Neutral following exceptional Q1 RPO/backlog growth," says BofA Securities analyst Brad Sills. "Although profitability of AI workloads remains a key debate, it is clear that Oracle is capturing share in the large and rapidly growing market for AI infrastructure."
ORCL's blowout day helped boost other AI stocks, including Nvidia (NVDA, +3.9%), Broadcom (AVGO, +9.8%) and Palantir Technologies (PLTR, +2.7%).
Klarna gains in market debut
Elsewhere on Wall Street, Klarna (KLAR) made its market debut after the buy now, pay later firm priced its initial public offering (IPO) last night at $40 per share – above the anticipated range and raised $1.37 billion. This makes it one of the biggest IPOs of the year thus far.
As for today's trading, KLAR stock opened this afternoon at $52 per share, hit an intraday high of $57.20 and closed at $45.82.
While Klarna's first-day gain is indeed impressive, it falls short of other recent IPOs such as Figma (FIG) or Circle Internet Group (CRCL), which more than doubled in their market debuts.
But Phil Haslett, co-founder and chief strategy officer at Equityzen says "this is actually the ideal scenario for a company: a modest uplift on day one signals the offering was priced correctly and that there's genuine excitement for the business. Overall, it looks like a solid start."
Apple puts pressure on the Dow and Nasdaq
As for the main indexes, the S&P 500 finished up 0.3% at 6,532 and the Nasdaq Composite added 0.03% to 21,886– new record closing highs.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average slumped 0.5% to 45,490 as Apple (AAPL, -3.2%) continued to fall following Tuesday's iPhone 17 launch event.
Needham analyst Laura Martin said she saw nothing at the event that made her want to raise estimates for iPhone sales.
"We argue that AAPL is a single product company, with the iPhone as its anchor product, and, therefore, AAPL shares will NOT work until there is an iPhone replacement cycle. We retain our Hold [rating]," Martin wrote in a note to clients.
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