Alaskan coastal brown bear waving (Getty Images)

US stocks drop for second straight day

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 each gave back 0.3% while the Russell 2000 underperformed with a 0.9% drop.

9/24/25 4:44PM

US stocks opened higher before quickly falling into the red, where they stayed for most of the session Wednesday.

The S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 each gave back 0.3% while the Russell 2000 underperformed with a 0.9% drop.

Energy was the best-performing S&P 500 sector ETF, while materials and consumer discretionary were at the bottom of the leaderboard.

Centene and Mosaic were among the day’s bright spots, jumping 5.8% apiece. Freeport-McMoRan led declines, sinking 17% after the mining giant declared force majeure at its Grasberg mine in Indonesia and said it expects lower copper and gold sales. Elsewhere...

UniQure soared over 240% after the pharma company released trial results that showed its experimental gene therapy for Huntington’s disease slowed its progression by 75% after three years.

Alibaba jumped over 8% after the Chinese tech giant announced plans to upsize its investments in AI, a partnership with Nvidia, and its new AI model series Qwen3-Max.

RedCloud Holdings leapt nearly 63% after the UK-based business-to-business platform announced that “it has joined the NVIDIA Connect program as part of its mission to deliver a new operating system for global trade.”

Shares of Opendoor reversed course, soaring almost 16% after sinking on Monday and Tuesday as one of the company’s largest shareholders, Access Industries, looks to be in the process of exiting its position in the stock.

Canopy Growth rallied 8.8% after the cannabis company’s CEO, Luc Mongeau, disclosed an unplanned stock purchase of 27,469 shares on Tuesday.

Lucid rose more than 3% after the electric vehicle maker delivered its first Uber robotaxi (of 20,000) and saw a stock price target bump to $26 from $20 by Cantor Fitzgerald.

Micron fell 2.8% even after the chipmaker announced strong Q4 results after the bell Tuesday and provided profitability guidance for the current quarter that exceeded Wall Street’s expectations.

Oracle dipped 1.8% even as the cloud giant announced late Tuesday that it would join OpenAI and SoftBank in expanding the Stargate project with five new AI data center sites.

Max Knoblauch9m

Nio, Li Auto rise as Q1 delivery totals beat internal guidance

China’s EV startup trio — Nio, Li Auto, and XPeng — are all climbing on Wednesday, following the release of March and first-quarter delivery totals.

Nio delivered 83,465 vehicles in the three months that ended in March, up 99% from the same quarter a year ago and slightly beating the upper end of its guidance. Li Auto delivered 95,142 vehicles in the period, up 2.5% and ahead of its guidance range. The figure was bolstered by 12% growth in March deliveries.

XPeng, on the other hand, saw Q1 deliveries drop 33% year over year to 62,682 vehicles — the company’s first quarterly drop since 2023. Shares are still up as of 10 a.m. ET on Wednesday, as the automaker’s March deliveries were up 80% from February’s total.

BYD is down more than 2% on Wednesday, as the automaker posted its seventh consecutive month of sales declines. First-quarter sales fell 30% year over year, Reuters reported.

Matt Phillips24m

Data center trade reboots amid Iran relief rally

Memory, networking, chipmaking machinery, semiconductor, and rack-building stocks were all up early Wednesday, in a broad-based reboot of the data center trade on growing optimism about America’s potential exit from the Iran war.

Companies that make all the core components of data center were on the move early. Memory plays Micron, Sandisk, Western Digital, and Seagate Technology Holdings all opened near the top of the S&P 500’s leaders, as they shook off last week’s jitters related to a Google Research announcement about an AI algorithm that might cut demand for memory.

Fiber-optic and networking shares like Ciena Corp., Arista Networks, Corning, Coherent, Amphenol, and Lumentum — popular recent data center plays — also rose. OG data center trades like chip companies Nvidia, Intel, and Advanced Micro Devices gained. And the companies that make the machines that make the chips, like Lam Research and KLA Corp, are also catching a bid.

Even the more hard-hat elements of the AI boom were up, with Comfort Systems USA, Eaton Corp, Carrier, and Quanta Services rising. Server rack builders Dell and HP Enterprise also increased.

Clearly, there’s a big element of relief rally at play in the early bounce, building on Monday’s advance, which saw the S&P 500 post its biggest one-day gain since May.

Luke Kawa33m

Intel soars after buying back stake in Irish manufacturing facility

Intel is spending $14.2 billion to take back full ownership of a manufacturing facility in Ireland, the company announced on Wednesday.

“The agreement reflects Intel’s continued business momentum underpinned by the growing and essential role CPUs play in the era of AI,” according to the company’s press release.

Shares are soaring, up around 6% in early trading.

Investors appear to be viewing this measure as a concrete sign that Intel’s turnaround plan is entering a new phase — growth mode, powered by AI — after years of sluggish sales forced a focus on cost controls.

The chipmaker had previously sold a 49% stake in this fab for $11.2 billion to Apollo Global Management in order to raise cash for other investment opportunities, including its 18A manufacturing process in the US.

Intel intends to fund the transaction through available cash and an additional $6.5 billion in debt.

Luke Kawa

OpenAI to be added to ARK’s ETF lineup after completing funding round with $852 billion valuation

ARK and buzzy companies go together like early LLMs and hallucinations.