Stan Choe
The worst day for Microsoft in years is yanking the US stock market away from its record heights on Thursday. The fever in the gold and metals markets may be breaking, meanwhile, after prices suddenly snapped back following their jaw-dropping runs.
The S&P 500 sank 1 per cent after flirting with its all-time high earlier in the morning. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 113 points, or 0.2 per cent, as of noon Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was 1.9 per cent lower.
The Australian sharemarket is set to dip, with futures at 4.51am AEDT pointing to a fall of 3 points at the open. The ASX on Thursday. The Australian dollar was trading at US70.24¢ at 5.20am AEDT
Microsoft was the heaviest weight on Wall Street by far, and it tumbled 12 per cent even though the tech giant reported stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Investors honed in instead on how much Microsoft is spending on investments, whether growth in its Azure cloud business will slow and how long its push into artificial-intelligence technology will take to turn into big profits.
Its stock is on track for its worst day since the market’s COVID crash in 2020, and it was alone responsible for more than two-thirds of the S&P 500’s drop.
Tesla also weighed on the market after falling 2.3 per cent. It delivered a bigger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, but the results were sharply lower than from a year earlier. Tesla’s leader, Elon Musk, has been trying to get investors to focus less on its flagging car sales and more on the company’s robotaxis and robots.
Companies across the market are under pressure to deliver at least solid growth in profits following record-setting runs for their stock prices. Stock prices tend to follow the path of corporate profits over the long term, and earnings need to rise to quiet criticism that stock prices have grown too expensive.
ServiceNow dropped 11.8 per cent even though it reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than expected. Analysts praised the performance, but it wasn’t enough to stop a slide for the stock that’s been underway since the summer.
Still, more stocks rose in the S&P 500 than fell. Leading them was Meta Platforms. The company behind Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp rallied 8.6 per cent after topping profit expectations, even though it also said it will continue its massive investments in AI.
IBM was another winner and climbed 6 per cent after surpassing analysts’ expectations for profit and revenue. Southwest Airlines flew 15.4 per cent higher even though its profit fell short of forecasts. It gave a forecast for earnings in 2026 that blew past analysts’ expectations, saying it’s seeing strong momentum after making changes to its business like charging baggage fees and having assigned seating.
Some of the wildest action in financial markets was again for precious metals.
Gold’s price rallied near $US5600 per ounce in the morning before it suddenly and briefly dropped back below $US5200. It was most recently at $US5286.90, down 1 per cent from the prior day.
It was only on Monday that gold’s price topped $US5000 for the first time, and it had nearly doubled over the last 12 months.
Silver, which has been zooming higher in its own feverish run, had a similar and sudden reversal of momentum.
Prices for precious metals had been surging as investors looked for safer things to own while weighing a wide range of risks, including a US stock market that critics call expensive, political instability, threats of tariffs and heavy debt loads for governments worldwide.
But safety can come at a price when it’s really expensive. The huge run for gold and silver raised criticism that their prices had gone too far, too fast and were due for a pullback. Even bitcoin, which is pitched as a form of “digital gold,” fell sharply. It sank nearly 5 per cent and dropped toward $US85,000.
The US dollar has seen its value sink over the last year because of many of the same risks that drove gold’s price higher, but the dollar held relatively steady against the British pound, euro and other competitors Thursday.
In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury dipped to 4.24 per cent from 4.26 per cent late Wednesday.
The Federal Reserve decided on Wednesday to at least pause cuts to its main interest rate. That was after the Fed cut rates three times in a row to close out 2025 in an attempt to shore up the job market.
Helping to keep the Fed on pause is the fact that inflation remains stubbornly above the central bank’s 2 per cent target. Lower rates can worsen inflation. They could also further undercut the US dollar’s value, which would help US exporters.
President Donald Trump has been pushing aggressively for lower rates and once again on Thursday criticised the Fed’s chair personally for being “too late” to cut.
In stock markets abroad, indexes rose across much of Europe and Asia.
South Korea’s Kospi climbed 1 per cent for one of the world’s bigger moves, lifted to another record in part by chipmaker SK Hynix.
AP
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