Suddenly the stock market is on track for broad gains. Whether or not they hold through the close is a different story.
The S&P 500 is up 0.2% in midday trading. More importantly, roughly 357 of the index’s members were on track for gains. The Dow was up 250 points, or 0.6%. The Nasdaq Composite was down 0.2% but well off the day’s lows.
The S&P’s biggest laggards are Palantir Technologies, Constellation Energy, and Western Digital. Other popular AI plays including Super Micro Computer and Vistra were also struggling.
Utilities, tech, and consumer discretionary were the only S&P sectors on the decline. Worries about consumer demand of late have hammered the consumer discretionary sector; it’s down 7.5% so far this month, on track for its worst monthly decline since it fell 11.3% in December 2022, according to Dow Jones Market Data.
The S&P is looking to rebound from Friday’s slide, which was the index’s worst day of 2025. It’s been mostly about trading activity in the absence of major economic or company news. That will change dramatically in the days ahead, when updates on gross domestic product growth, Nvidia earnings, and the Federal Reserve’s preferred inflation gauge are set to roll out for investors to parse.
Aside from breadth, volatility settled down. The VIX briefly spiked north of 20—a level that signals heightened volatility, before pulling back. It’s now down 2.6% on the day to 17.73. If the S&P can hold onto its gains, it will be a positive signal in the wake of steep selling that capped off last week’s trading.
