Markets

S&P 500 dips as traders ditch high-flying stocks and go bargain hunting

The start of the third quarter was marked by a vibe shift: an intense rotation from the market’s winners into value stocks. Alas, since value stocks often get that title from underperformance, making them smaller members of a benchmark, this shift in allocations saw the S&P 500 end 0.1% lower despite advancers outnumbering decliners by 255. Until today, the S&P 500 hadn’t declined during a session in which this many of its constituents rose in all of 2025.

The Nasdaq 100 fell 0.9% while the Russell 2000 rose 0.9%.

Top performers in the S&P 500 included casino stocks Las Vegas Sands, Wynn Resorts, and MGM, which were all up over 7% on the back of strong June Macao gaming numbers. On the flip side, GE Vernova and Axon Enterprise fell 4.3% and 6.3%, respectively, leading the day’s declines.

Target shares rose 5% as bullish call option activity surged, part of the broader factor rotation where traders are pivoting from high-flyers to beaten-down names.

Ford and GM jumped 4.7% and 5.7%, respectively, after both posted solid Q2 vehicle sales. Ford’s sales rose over 14%, while GM’s climbed more than 7%.

Tesla slipped 5% after President Trump threatened to have “DOGE take a good, hard look” at EV-friendly government subsidies — a critical part of Elon Musk’s business.

AI trade names like Meta, Palantir, and Cloudflare, along with chipmakers Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom, all declined in this factor rotation, also weighed down by Senate Republicans scrapping a bill provision that would have banned state-level AI regulation.

AMC sank 9% after the movie theater chain and meme stock favorite struck a debt-for-equity swap and settled litigation with creditors.

Rivian shares dipped 1.9% while Lucid’s fell 3.7% as the Senate worked to advance a version of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which would slash a number of EV benefits and charger network budgets.

Warner Bros. Discovery dropped over 4% after the Newhouse family — longtime media moguls and Condé Nast owners — sold $1.1 billion worth of shares.

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Nio sinks after announcing $1 billion share offering to fund EV development

US-listed ADRs of Chinese EV maker Nio sank more than 8% in premarket trading on Wednesday as investors face $1 billion in share dilution from a secondary offering.

Nio plans to issue up to nearly 182 million shares, raising up to $1 billion according to terms seen by Bloomberg.

Net proceeds from the sale will be put toward R&D around smart EVs and used to “develop future technology platforms and vehicle models across its brands,” Nio said in its announcement. The company also plans to expand its battery swapping and charging network.

The EV maker, which has yet to post a profit in its 11-year history, has ambitious growth plans despite the steep competition in China. It delivered a record 31,305 vehicles in August, including 10,575 sales of its Onvo L90, a Tesla Model Y competitor. The new three-row, $27,000 SUV is the company’s fastest model to reach 10,000 sales.

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Oracle’s outlook for massive cloud sales growth is driving a bid to buy everything AI

“Listen, even I’m sort of blown away by what this looks like going forward.”

That’s how the Q&A portion of Oracle’s Q1 2026 earnings call started, with Guggenheim Securities analyst John DiFucci expressing amazement at the company’s outlook for hockey-stick revenue growth in its cloud business thanks to AI.

Oracle’s outlook for cloud sales to rise in an Nvidia-like fashion to $144 billion in its fiscal 2030 from $18 billion in fiscal 2026 is fueling gains across chip suppliers, infrastructure suppliers, server companies, and power providers linked to the AI boom.

Though the gains pale in comparison to Oracle’s more than 30% advance in premarket trading, the other companies atop the S&P 500’s leaderboard include Advanced Micro Devices, GE Vernova, Vistra, Nvidia, Arista Networks, Constellation Energy, Broadcom, NRG, Micron, and Super Micro Computer. All are up at least 1.5% as of 8 a.m. ET.

It’s a similar dynamic to what we saw throughout the AI ecosystem on the heels of Microsoft and Meta’s earnings reports at the end of July, and quite different from the reaction within the chip space after Broadcom’s quarterly release last week (even if that didn’t really make a ton of sense fundamentally).

The seemingly massive rising tide prophesied by Oracle really is lifting all boats.

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