Charging Bull in New York City (Sarah Stier/Getty Images)

Market wrap

US stocks rally as momentum stocks live up to their name

All three indexes finished in the green.

10/23/25 4:02PM

US stocks bounced back strongly on Thursday, as the S&P 500 erased the prior session’s losses with a 0.6% gain, the Nasdaq 100 was up 0.9%, and the Russell 2000 booked an advance of more than 1%.

The iShares MSCI USA Momentum Factor ETF snapped its longest streak of underperforming the SPDR S&P 500 ETF in over a year, with both AI-geared megacaps and more speculative nonprofitable tech stocks rallying strongly.

The S&P sector ETFs for energy, tech, industrials, and materials all gained more than 1%.

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Stocks that moved higher:

Tesla, which reported earnings after the bell on Wednesday, was red in premarket trading as investors worried over weaker margins and growing costs, but recovered by midday to finish up over 2%.
GameStop surged amid bullish options flows, with a put/call ratio of just 0.1.
Las Vegas Sands soared after a strong Q3 earnings report driven by strong momentum in Macau and Singapore that fueled analyst optimism.
Quantum stocks including IonQ, Rigetti, and D-Wave Quantum, soared after some outlets reported that the Trump administration is in talks to invest directly in the sector, though other sources contradicted the account.
American Airlines flew higher as its third-quarter loss came in smaller than expected.
West Pharmaceutical spiked after reporting quarterly earnings that showed continued GLP-1 demand.

Stocks that moved lower:

Molina Healthcare sank after an earnings miss driven by its Affordable Care Act plans, dragging down peers Centene and Oscar Health with it.
IBM, which reported earnings after the bell yesterday, was down over 5% in early trading as analysts and investors parsed its results, but managed to pare losses through the session.
Beyond Meat had another brutal session that started even before the opening bell, where the meme stock saw extremely high trading volumes.
Super Micro Computer fell after announcing preliminary Q1 net sales far below Wall Street’s expectations.
Southwest Airlines dropped on bearish options activity even though its third-quarter earnings beat expectations.

Tasha Matsumoto

15h

Stocks rebound as the price of oil retreats

Every sector traded higher, with tech leading gains on increased optimism that tankers will be able to pass through the Strait of Hormuz.

Luke Kawa

16h

Nvidia briefly spikes after Jensen Huang sees at least $1 trillion in AI chip sales through 2027

The stock then gave it all up and then some.

Luke Kawa17h

Oil’s retreat propels US stocks higher

Front-month West Texas Intermediate futures are down more than 4%, while Brent futures are off more than 2% as of 1:25 p.m. ET as traders glom on to some optimistic signs about the flow of oil through the all-important Strait of Hormuz:

A Pakistani-owned tanker passed through the strait this weekend while broadcasting its signal, per Reuters, “indicating ‌that some countries are able to negotiate safe passage for their vessels despite the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.”
US President Donald Trump said that some “fairly local” countries would soon be helping ships traverse the strait (while having added that other countries are “not enthusiastic” about the prospect of participating).

First non-Iranian cargo transits Strait of Hormuz with AIS on

The Aframax tanker Karachi, carrying Abu Dhabi’s Das crude, has become the first non-Iranian cargo to transit the chokepoint while broadcasting its AIS signal, suggesting that select shipments may be receiving… pic.twitter.com/Q6j6W3Cxz3
— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) March 16, 2026

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF and Invesco QQQ Trust are both up over 1% amid oil’s retreat.

That being said, the news flow is far from universally positive.

Reuters reports that the UAE’s crude output has been cut in half since the Mideast conflict started; Bloomberg says Kuwait’s production has suffered a similar decline.

Trump urges allies to help reopen Strait of Hormuz as tanker traffic nearly vanishes

A Pakistani-owned tanker passed through the strait this weekend while broadcasting its signal, per Reuters, “indicating ‌that some countries are able to negotiate safe passage for their vessels despite the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran.”
US President Donald Trump said that some “fairly local” countries would soon be helping ships traverse the strait (while having added that other countries are “not enthusiastic” about the prospect of participating).

First non-Iranian cargo transits Strait of Hormuz with AIS on

The Aframax tanker Karachi, carrying Abu Dhabi’s Das crude, has become the first non-Iranian cargo to transit the chokepoint while broadcasting its AIS signal, suggesting that select shipments may be receiving… pic.twitter.com/Q6j6W3Cxz3
— MarineTraffic (@MarineTraffic) March 16, 2026

The SPDR S&P 500 ETF and Invesco QQQ Trust are both up over 1% amid oil’s retreat.

That being said, the news flow is far from universally positive.

Reuters reports that the UAE’s crude output has been cut in half since the Mideast conflict started; Bloomberg says Kuwait’s production has suffered a similar decline.

Matt Phillips18h

Sandisk and memory stocks rip ahead of Nvidia CEO’s speech

Memory stocks such as Sandisk, Micron, and disk drive makers Western Digital and Seagate sprinted ahead Monday, as this week’s big AI conference for tech bellwether Nvidia gets underway with a speech from the CEO slated for this afternoon.

As Luke Kawa pointed out earlier, CEO Jensen Huang’s speechifying at high-profile company announcements or industry events hasn’t always been a good thing for Nvidia shares. (The chip designer is holding its GPU Technology Conference, or GTC, this week.)

But Huang’s pronouncements have, at times, been pretty dang helpful for share prices of some companies in the orbit of the AI gods. Perhaps foremost among them are the memory stocks that have blasted toward the top of the S&P 500 in terms of price performance in recent years.

Case in point: the nearly 30% gain that Sandisk posted on January 6, the day after Huang’s keynote speech at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, in which he spotlighted memory as a key bottleneck constraining the AI build-out. (Fellow memory plays Western Digital, Seagate Technology Holdings, and Micron also posted double-digit gains that day.)

Memory stocks have been the highest-profile outlet for bullish AI industry impulses this year, and notable comments from Huang could put the wind back in their sails after they had slowed in recent weeks.

Of course, there are also other things happening in the sector, such as Micron’s announcement Sunday that it completed an acquisition of a new manufacturing site in Taiwan.

Either way, memory stocks are pushing higher after having exhaled a bit lately.

What Wall Street’s looking for from Jensen Huang’s keynote GTC address

Of course, there are also other things happening in the sector, such as Micron’s announcement Sunday that it completed an acquisition of a new manufacturing site in Taiwan.

Either way, memory stocks are pushing higher after having exhaled a bit lately.

Luke Kawa

21h

What Wall Street’s looking for from Jensen Huang’s keynote GTC address

GTC may stand for GPU Technology Conference, but investors are looking for Nvidia to go beyond GPUs.