US stocks end mixed; traders are watching the Nvidia report

Stocks on Wall Street closed mixed on Friday as investors looked ahead to Nvidia’s quarterly results next week and worried the Federal Reserve could hold off on cutting U.S. interest rates in December. The market partially recovered after a sell-off early in the session that dragged all three major Wall Street indexes down more than 1%.

Investors have worried in recent days about the pace of interest rate cuts and the expensive valuations of heavy artificial intelligence stocks, which have fueled much of the U.S. stock market’s gains in recent years.Nvidia, Palantir, Microsoft and Tesla all won.

Expectations that the Fed will cut rates at its December policy meeting have faded in recent days amid signs of persistent inflation, driven in part by US President Donald Trump’s global tariffs. According to CME Group’s FedWatch tool, the probability of a 25 basis point rate cut in December has fallen to less than 50% from 67% last week.

Jeffrey Schmid, president of the Kansas City Fed, said Friday that his concerns about “too high” inflation extend far beyond the limited effects of rates. He indicated that he could differ again at the Fed meeting in December if policymakers chose to lower borrowing costs in the short term. He was one of two dissenters in the Fed’s decision in October to cut its policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point. AI chipmaker Nvidia will be the center of Wall Street’s attention when it reports quarterly results on Wednesday, with investors eager for new evidence that a race to dominate the emerging technology is not losing steam. “We have a big event next week with Nvidia,” said Mike Dickson, head of research and quantitative strategies at Horizon Investments in Charlotte, North Carolina. “If Nvidia disappoints, they will be punished. But I also think that just like you’re seeing today, you’ll see dip buyers come back pretty quickly and things will stabilize.”

According to preliminary data, the S&P 500 lost 2.70 points, or 0.05%, to end at 6,734.42, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 29.17 points, or 0.13%, to 22,899.53. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 308.29 points, or 0.65%, to 47,148.93.

Concerns about the health of the labor market and the inflation outlook have weighed on investors, who expect some permanent gaps in official economic data even after the record-long U.S. government shutdown ended Thursday.

In global trade, the Swiss government said US tariffs on Swiss goods will be cut from 39% to 15%.

Warner Bros Discovery posted a profit after the entertainment company said it changed CEO David Zaslav’s employment contract during a strategic review of its operations.

Shares of Cidara Therapeutics doubled after Merck said it would acquire the company in a deal worth nearly $9.2 billion.