US STOCKS-Wall St slides as Nvidia overhang weighs on tech
By Niket Nishant and Utkarsh Hathi
Nov 13 (Reuters) - The major US stock indexes fell on Friday as fresh concerns about Nvidia reignited a selloff in technology shares, while softer October producer prices data offered little relief.
Nvidia's NVDA.O shares plunged 4.3% and were on track for their longest streak of weekly losses since October 2012 after CEO Jensen Huang's resignation on Thursday, following scrutiny of his relationship with a businesswoman suspected by the US of spying for Beijing.
The turmoil has raised concerns about the AI trade, given Nvidia's central role in the industry's boom and its financial ties to several companies in the sector.
The Philadelphia semiconductor index .SOX fell 6%, with Advanced Micro Devices AMD.O and Broadcom AVGO.O dropping 10% and 7%, respectively.
Neoclouds CoreWeave CRWV.O and Nebius NBIS.O shed 10% each, while data center-related firms IREN IREN.O, Applied Digital APLD.O and Core Scientific CORZ.O declined between 3% and 9%.
The losses leave equities vulnerable heading into Anthropic's much-anticipated IPO next week, which could test investor appetite for established AI heavyweights as money potentially shifts toward the new entrant.
"Something that will be interesting to see is if all the supply of new equity is going to be absorbed in a way that doesn't result in selling other AI stocks to kind of fund that," said Angelo Kourkafas, senior global investment strategist at Edward Jones.
At 11:23 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI fell 122.12 points, or 0.23%, to 52,174.97, the S&P 500 .SPX lost 76.88 points, or 1.01%, to 7,515.49, and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC dropped 441.78 points, or 1.74%, to 24,923.79.
Among the Magnificent Seven, Apple AAPL.O and Meta META.O were the only gainers, rising less than 1% each. Microsoft MSFT.O was down 0.4% after a more than 12-hour outage of Outlook and Teams.
INFLATION CONCERNS REMAIN
The tech index .SPLRCT was the biggest loser on the S&P 500, dropping 3%. Six of the 11 major S&P sector indexes were in negative territory.
In economic data, the October Producer Price Index for final demand was slightly softer than expected, but still shot up 6.5% year over year, its largest annual gain since November 2022.
"That's definitely not good, especially on the heels of a rotten CPI (Consumer Price Index) number earlier this week. It shows that inflation continues to be a problem," said Jon Zetlmaier, founder of Zetlmaier Wealth Management.
In other movers, Cerebras CBRS.O jumped more than 6% after the chip and cloud company raised its 2026 revenue forecast and signed Microsoft as a customer.
Strong earnings have at certain points kept negative market sentiment in check this week. Of the 450 companies in the S&P 500 that reported earnings as of Thursday, 83.6% surpassed expectations, according to Tajinder Dhillon, head of earnings and equity research at LSEG Data and Analytics.
Investors, though, are wary of a bunch of risks, including on the geopolitical front. Oil prices were in positive territory for the third consecutive session, a day after President Donald Trump said the US does not need a deal with Iran.
Declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 1.49-to-1 ratio on the NYSE and by a 2.03-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.
The S&P 500 posted 9 new 52-week highs and 1 new low, while the Nasdaq Composite recorded 22 new highs and 258 new lows.