S&P 500 closes little changed as oil rises on Iran uncertainty, Intel leads chips lower

The S&P 500 finished Monday’s session around the flatline.

The broad-based index dropped just 0.06% to 7,753.11, while the Nasdaq Composite shed 0.32% to settle at 26,605.36. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 60.95 points, or 0.11% to 53,975.98.

— Sean Conlon

The latest rally to record highs for the market may soon run out of steam, according to BTIG’s Jonathan Krinsky.

The chief market technician likened the current run-up to that which occurred in late 2021, when the S&P 500 was able to come out of trading in a “sideways” range for a number of months with a 6% rally to a new 52-week high. That rally took place as high-beta momentum stocks were already in a drawdown of 25%, which is “similar to what we are seeing right now,” he said.

“While history doesn’t repeat, it often rhymes, and we think this recent ‘breakout’ is also likely to falter,” Krinsky wrote in a note dated Sunday.

Krinsky noted that a lot of areas in the market outside of tech rallied during the unwind of the momentum trade in July, and those areas have continued to move higher as the momentum trade has recovered. Notably, the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF (RSP) has risen nearly 3% over the past month. The S&P 500 has gained more than 2% in the same period.

“Our sense is a lot of buying has been done and the risk of an air-pocket is now much higher for the RSP. In other words, we don’t see much juice left to squeeze,” he wrote.

— Sean Conlon

Evercore ISI says the odds of its bull case for the S&P 500 reaching 9,000 have strengthened, even as volatility picks up. Volatility does not mean the bull market is in danger of peaking, according to Evercore strategist Julian Emanuel.

“Rather, the odds for our bull case SPX 9,000 have strengthened. Elements that “kill” a bull market, true FOMO, are still in front of us. But as it was in 1999, more upside will be driven by more volatility,” Emanuel wrote. “As earnings season winds down, the macro, where uncertainty abounds, reasserts in the near term.”

Evercore’s AI FOMO Barometer is at 4 out of 10, compared with above 7 around the dot-com peak.

— Deena Zaidi

Mizuho sees upside to Broadcom as its custom AI chip business expands beyond Google to Meta, OpenAI, Anthropic and Apple, while advanced packaging technology could significantly increase chip production.

The biggest opportunity could come in 2028, when advanced packaging technologies like CoPoS and EMIB could unlock much higher TPU/ASIC production, Mizuho analyst Vijay Rakesh said in a note Sunday. Still, the stock is still relatively inexpensive compared with the growth expected from its AI business.

“We see it best positioned in AI ASIC market at a significant discount and its pipeline expands with a wide technology moat,” Rakesh said.

— Tanaya Macheel

Check out some of the companies making the biggest moves midday:

• MarineMax — The boat and yacht retailer soared 46% after agreeing to be sold to Blackstone Infrastructure’s Safe Harbor Marinas for $53 a share in cash, or $1.5 billion. The deal’s expected to close by the end of 2026.
• Varex Imaging — The imaging component maker climbed 48% after Teledyne Technologies agreed to buy Varex for $18.90 a share in cash. The deal is expected to close in early 2027. Teledyne rose a fraction.
• Artificial intelligence infrastructure — Stocks tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure slid. The Global X Data Center & Digital Infrastructure ETF (DTCR) lost 1%. Corning fell more than 3%. Photonics stocks Coherent and Lumentum dropped 12% and more than 6% respectively.

Read the full list here.

— Scott Schnipper

Wells Fargo moved to the bear camp on Doximity after its monster rally.

Analyst Stan Berenshteyn downgraded the digital medical platform to underweight from equal weight. Berenshteyn’s $18 price target implies a roughly 34% slide from where shares ended last week.

Doximity shares surged more than 32% on Friday, marking the stock’s best day in more than a year. In addition to the company raising its full-year revenue outlook, CEO Jeffrey Tangney said that its artificial intelligence search tool brings in 10-times the amount of cash that it costs to run.

“Our outlook remains essentially unchanged, yet DOCS now trades closer to more consistent, faster growing, peers,” Berenshteyn wrote to clients in a Sunday note. “This suggests upside increasingly depends on an AI narrative that is difficult to translate into estimates.”

“Until the narrative translates into a clearer growth inflection, we see unfavorable risk/reward,” Berenshteyn added.

Doximity shares pulled back by more than 5% in Monday’s session. Despite Friday’s surge, the stock is down more than 41% in 2026.

— Alex Harring

Bank of America analysts maintain buy rating on Nvidia and call it a top sector pick, noting the company’s shares are cheap despite how fast it’s growing. The analysts called the memory and circular financial concerns “overblown.” 

The analysts also expect Nvidia will beat revenue expectations and raise its outlook ahead of its fourth-quarter report coming out on Aug. 26. 

Investors should focus on five factors, including tracking the Vera Rubin chip launch and checking GM’s durability amid memory cost inflation, the analysts added.

— Ananya Chetia

SpaceX briefly rebounded to its $135 IPO price, after the space company’s latest earnings reaffirmed analysts’ confidence in the stock. Last week, Elon Musk’s rocket maker posted a revenue beat for the second quarter, its first earnings report since its June debut. Much of the company’s revenue last year came from its connectivity segment.

Multiple shops on Wall Street gave SpaceX their vote of confidence as a result, saying the company’s launch capabilities and ability to scale space infrastructure bodes well for the stock. Citi’s John Godyn, who has a buy rating on on SpaceX, reiterated a $200 price target implying roughly 50% upside. Deutsche Bank Research’s Edison Yu, who also has a buy rating and a $235 price target, noted that the company has a “fast path” to a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate. Yu expected the goal was achievable, likely because of the company’s neocloud and Cursor businesses.

SpaceX shares have been rocky since the IPO, falling to as low as $108.27 just days ago. It was last marginally lower.

— Sarah Min

Wharton professor Jeremy Siegel said disappointing productivity growth is one reason many Americans remain unhappy with the economy, as wage gains struggle to keep pace with inflation.

“Productivity growth in the last three quarters has been very disappointing and we need to ramp that up,” Siegel told CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” adding that growth has been below the 15-year average. “Workers are losing to inflation.”

Productivity growth has averaged about 2.5% since GPT was introduced in late 2022, says Siegel, but has weakened recently. He said a rebound could help lift real wages and support the broader economy. 

— Deena Zaidi

Berkshire Hathaway shares climbed Monday after stronger operating results and a pickup in capital deployment.

The conglomerate’s Class A shares rose 2.3% in morning trading after Berkshire reported a 16% increase in second-quarter operating earnings, fueled by strength in its energy, railroad and other businesses that more than offset weaker insurance underwriting.

Investors also cheered signs that Berkshire is putting more of its massive cash pile to work under new CEO Greg Abel. The company repurchased about $4.5 billion of its own shares during the quarter, a sharp acceleration from just $235 million in the first three months of the year.

Berkshire also became a net buyer of stocks for the first time in 15 quarters, purchasing nearly $20 billion more equities than it sold. Its cash pile declined to $365.5 billion at the end of June from a record $397.4 billion three months earlier.

— Yun Li

Oil prices rose on Monday, as doubt grows that the U.S. and Iran will reach a deal to increase ship traffic through the Strait of Hormuz.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures rose 2.4% to $80.03 per barrel as of 9:44 a.m. ET. Brent crude, the international benchmark, were also up 2.4% at $85.53 a barrel. Read more.

— Spencer Kimball and Justina Lee

The S&P 500 began Monday’s session little changed.

The broad index traded around the flatline just after the opening bell, while the Nasdaq Composite declined 0.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 61 points, or 0.1%.

— Sean Conlon

Shares of GameStop jumped more than 2% after Bloomberg reported that the company is weighing abandoning its $56 billion bid for eBay.

GameStop’s unsolicited bid was originally rejected by eBay in May, where the online retailer called it “neither credible nor attractive.” In June, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen said he would not receive a $35 billion compensation package — contingent on him meeting certain performance metrics — so that the company could focus on the eBay acquisition.

The push by GameStop to acquire eBay has mostly confused Wall Street, primarily due to what the videogame retailer was prepared to pay for it. While GameStop offered $56 billion for the company, its market cap as of Friday’s close is less than $9 billion.

— Davis Giangiulio

Shares of Intel shed more than 3% in the premarket on Monday after the chipmaker announced a common stock offering of $15 billion.

The company said in a statement that it plans to use the money from the offering for general corporate purposes — which could include capital expenditures and working capital.

As its customers “continue to signal a strong and sustainable demand environment” as a result of the artificial intelligence boom, Intel said the offering is intended to provide more support to the company as it pursues future growth opportunities.

— Sean Conlon

Check out the companies making the biggest moves premarket:

• Hewlett Packard Enterprise — Shares rose more than 5% after Morgan Stanley upgraded the stock to overweight from equal-weight. Analysts at the bank said the company has an attractive risk/reward profile at the moment, and that the market is underappreciating the asymmetry between HPE’s earnings power and valuation.
• Verisk Analytics — The data analytics company tumbled more than 6.5% after a Delaware judge on Friday ruled it must proceed with a $2.35 billion acquisition of AccuLynx. Verisk previously terminated a deal in December because a Federal Trade Commission review of the merger was not completed by the transaction’s termination date.
• Apple — The technology company declined 1% after Jefferies downgraded the stock to underperform from hold. According to the bank’s supply chain checks, analysts have concluded than an all-glass iPhone by Apple, something the company has never publicly announced, appears to be canceled. That puts pressure on Apple which is trying to create more expensive devices to combat the rising cost of memory.

Read here for the full list.

— Davis Giangiulio

Oil prices climbed on Monday as traders grew uncertain over whether a deal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz would actually soon come to fruition.

Brent crude futures were up 1.5% at $84.76 per barrel as of 7:44 a.m. ET. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures rose 1.6% to $79.41 per barrel. Read more.

— Justina Lee and Sean Conlon

• S&P 500 futures edged higher early Monday. Futures tied to the broad index edged up 0.13%, while Nasdaq-100 futures added 0.38%. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures were trading just below the flatline.
• Oil prices rose on Monday in choppy trading, as investors continue to assess mixed signals from the U.S. and Iran on the status of the Strait of Hormuz. 
• Gold was flat on Monday after prices hit a seven-week high in Friday’s session. Spot gold was unmoved at $4,342.86 per ounce in early morning trade, while Comex gold futures were flat at $4,399.90. 
• The Trump administration has backed plans to build an Australian scandium mine as part of a push to challenge China’s critical-minerals dominance. Sunrise Energy Metals shares surged as much as 29% after a $400 million U.S. investment.

— Joseph Wilkins

U.S. Treasury yields inched lower at the start of the week as investors look ahead to a busy week of economic data, with particular focus on a key inflation reading.

At 3:58 a.m. ET, the 10-year Treasury yield was down just over 1 basis point, and the 30-year Treasury bond similarly declined 1 basis point. The 2-year Treasury note yield was trading just above the flatline.

A softer-than-expected July nonfarm payrolls report last week weakened expectations for Federal Reserve interest rate hikes. Deutsche Bank analysts said in a note on Monday that the weaker data “reduced the urgency for further Fed tightening in the near term.”

— Sawdah Bhaimiya

Asia-Pacific markets closed broadly higher on Monday.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 added 2.1% to close at 66,970, while Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index added 1%. South Korea’s Kospi gained 0.65% and the small-cap Kosdaq advanced 7%.

In Australia, the S&P/ASX 200′s closed down 0.3% at 9,232.60.

— Joseph Wilkins

The world’s five oil supermajors — Exxon Mobil, Chevron, BP, Shell and TotalEnergies — generated $48 billion in profit in the second quarter, benefitting from higher fossil fuel prices amid hostilities between the U.S. and Iran.

The companies also raked in nearly $90 billion in cash generation over the same period, reflecting an all-time high — higher even than in the wake of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in early 2022.

A key question now is whether the industry will use this unprecedented cash bonanza to reward shareholders, strengthen balance sheets or invest for the future.

Read the full story here.

— Sam Meredith

European stocks opened broadly flat on Monday as investors mulled uncertainty over the status of the Strait of Hormuz. 

Shortly after the opening bell, the pan-European Stoxx 600 index was seen trading at the flatline, with regional bourses and sectors painting a mixed picture.

London’s FTSE 100 was 0.1% lower, while France’s CAC 40 was flat and Germany’s DAX added 0.1%.

Tech stocks and miners led gains, while autos and media stocks lagged the broader index.

— Joseph Wilkins

Shares of rare earth miner Sunrise Energy Metals jumped as much as 29% on Monday, before paring gains, after the U.S. Department of War announced a conditional $400 million loan commitment to build out the firm’s scandium operations.

Scandium is considered a highly strategic rare earth element because of its unique properties, making it important for defense and aerospace applications, as well as providing reliable power for artificial intelligence data centers.

Sunrise Chairman Robert Friedland described the funding as “a landmark moment” for the company and Australia’s mining industry.

Read the full story here.

— Sam Meredith

Gold was flat on Monday after prices hit a seven-week high in Friday’s session. 

Spot gold was unmoved at $4,342.86 per ounce in early morning trade, while Comex gold futures were flat at $4,399.90. Prices ​had risen to the highest level since June 17 on Friday after weaker-than-expected U.S. nonfarm payrolls data. 

— Joseph Wilkins

Oil rose Monday, as traders continue to assess mixed signals from the U.S. and Iran amid worries that a deal between both countries to open the Strait of Hormuz may not be anytime soon.

Futures for international benchmark Brent crude for October delivery gained 1.04% to $84.42 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate futures for September advanced 0.83% to $78.83 per barrel.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said that Tehran is not currently in direct talks with the U.S. to end the war with Iran and open the Strait of Hormuz, while Washington earlier asserted that a deal is near.

“Uncertainty remains high as we go into the sixth month of the Iran war,” Westpac said in a note. “The Strait of Hormuz remains effectively closed and the entry of the Yemen Houthis into the fray is interrupting alternative Red Sea supply routes,” it added.

“As of Aug. 9, CENTCOM has redirected 55 commercial vessels, disabled 2, and boarded 2 to ensure compliance,” according to a post on X by U.S. Central Command.

— Justina Lee

Hong-Kong listed shares of Guotai Haitong advanced over 26% on Monday, after the Chinese financial services firm proposed to take an offshore unit private.

According to a filing on ​the Hong Kong stock exchange, the deal values the offshore unit at HK$28.59 billion ($3.64 billion). Guotai Haitong proposed to privatize Guotai Junan International at HK$3.0 a share, around 44% premium over the closing price.

The proposal is part of Guotai Haitong’s efforts to streamline its international operations following last year’s mega-merger between state-backed Chinese brokerages Guotai Junan Securities and Haitong Securities.

— Justina Lee

Shares of Recruit Holdings surged over 20%, after the Japanese human resources company raised its profit forecast.

Recruit raised its operating profit forecast to 945 billion yen ($5.97 billion) from 787 billion yen for the fiscal year ending in March, when it posted its quarterly earnings after the market close on Friday. Its earnings were supported by more monetization in its HR Technology business, as well as quicker-than-expected gains from its AI-driven hiring tools.

“Q1 results exceeded expectations and the larger-than-expect guidance revision proved a positive surprise,” Citi said in a note late Friday. “Considering the accelerating growth rate, we see sufficient upside potential,” it added.

— Justina Lee

Mainland China and Hong Kong shares rose Monday, tracking broad gains among other Asian markets.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index rose 0.37%, while mainland China’s CSI 300 gained 0.30%.

The gains in the Hang Seng were led by healthcare and consumer cyclicals sectors, up 2.03% and 0.87%, respectively.

— Justina Lee

Asia-Pacific markets were set to open higher on Monday, tracking U.S. stocks’ Friday gains.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 was poised to rise, with the Chicago futures contract at 66,300 and its Osaka counterpart last trading at 66,310, compared with the index’s previous close of 65,606.71.

Hong Kong Hang Seng index futures were at 25,790, compared with the index’s last close of 25,668.03.

In Australia, futures last traded at 9,233, while the S&P/ASX 200′s closed at 9,263.60.

On Friday, the S&P rose to a record following an unexpected loss of jobs in July which signaled that the Federal Reserve could leave monetary policy on hold for now.

Meanwhile, traders continue to assess mixed signals from the U.S. and Iran, following Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi’s comments that Tehran is not currently in direct talks with the U.S. to end the war with Iran and open the Strait of Hormuz, while Washington asserted that a deal is near.

— Justina Lee

Asia-Pacific markets traded broadly higher early Monday.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 added over 0.54% while the Topix was marginally higher.

The Kospi gained 0.53% at open, while the small-cap Kosdaq advanced 1.48%.

Australia’s benchmark S&P/ASX 200 was 0.54% higher.

— Justina Lee

Despite Sunday’s muted action, Wall Street is heading into the week with positive momentum.

The three major indexes are coming off their biggest weekly gains since April and recorded back-to-back winning weeks. What’s more, the S&P 500 finished last week at an all-time closing record.

— Alex Harring

S&P 500 futures are little changed shortly after 6 p.m. ET on Sunday.

WTI crude oil rose 1% to just above $79 a barrel amid concern among traders that the U.S. and Iran may not have a deal coming soon.

— Alex Harring