Stock market today: Nasdaq, S&P 500 futures fall, Dow stalls as Wall Street braces for CPI inflation data

Wall Street is flashing signs of a stock market melt-up, or a rapid and unexpected rise in stock prices, notes Yahoo Finance’s Ines Ferré.

That’s led some strategists to draw uncomfortable parallels to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. But some see a firmer basis for the enthusiasm.

Ines reports:

Semiconductor stocks have been gapping up so fast that market watchers are reaching for the playbook from the run-up year to the dot-com crash.

“Since the 3/30/26 low and in particular over the last couple of weeks, it Feels Like 1999,” Evercore ISI strategist Julian Emanuel and his team wrote in a note. “Relatives, friends, doctors, Uber drivers are all talking about AI/Tech stocks.”

But Emanuel and his team point out that enthusiasm in 2026 is built on a firmer foundation than the dot-com era.

In 1999, “dot-com darlings” traded at a median price-to-earnings multiple of around 152 times, meaning investors paid $152 for every $1 of profit. Today’s “AI Class of 2026” trades at roughly 39 times earnings.

“Valuations are high, but not Y2K extremes,” Emanuel wrote.

Read more here.

Bloomberg reports:

Oil steadied as US President Donald Trump cast doubt over the ceasefire with Iran after rejecting Tehran’s latest peace offer, prolonging the effective closure of the vital Strait of Hormuz.

Brent (BZ=F) crude traded above $104 a barrel after advancing 2.9% in the previous session, while West Texas Intermediate (CL=F) was near $98. Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that the truce was on “massive life support” while deriding the Iranian response to his proposal to end the 10-week war.

A ceasefire has been in place since early April and has held even after a series of flareups in violence recently, including attacks on ships. The near-closure of the Strait of Hormuz has significantly disrupted flows of crude, natural gas and fuels to global customers, raising concerns about an inflation crisis.

Read more here.

Bloomberg reports:

GameStop Corp (GME). shares spiked and then quickly dropped in postmarket trading Monday after cryptic social media posts showed up and then disappeared from the social media account of Keith Gill, the financial influencer known as “Roaring Kitty,” who became prominent during the 2021 meme-stock craze.

GameStop’s stock jumped as much as 13% before paring those gains to trade lower after the posts — including one depicting a cat, and another with a picture of the online character Pepe the Frog wearing Roaring Kitty’s trademark red bandanna — were deleted around 5:40 p.m. in New York, less than an hour after they went up.

Shares of Chewy Inc., which was founded by GameStop’s current chief executive officer, Ryan Cohen, also rose as much as 3% before erasing the move.

Read more here.