Stock market today: Live updates

Most attractive opportunities lie in SMID-cap stocks this year, Piper Sandler says

Piper Sandler expects another positive year for the stock market. In a Wednesday note, chief market technician Craig Johnson reiterated his S&P 500 year-end price objective of 6,600.

This target is approximately 9% higher than where the benchmark closed on Tuesday.

“The technical evidence of our sector, group, and trend work remains bullish, and we believe this bull market still has more room to run in 2025. At this time, our trend work suggests that SMID-Cap stocks offer the most compelling opportunities,” Johnson wrote, citing catalysts such as a robust labor market, AI-driven productivity gains and a strong U.S. economy.

Johnson also expects the Russell 2000 to outperform the 500-stock S&P this year.

— Lisa Kailai Han

Steve Cohen says the stock market may top out over the next few months, if it hasn’t already

Point72′s Steve Cohen believes the bull market could see a tougher ride in the second half of 2025 as President Donald Trump’s aggressive trade and immigration policies may slow down economic growth.

The prominent hedge fund investor, who also owns the New York Mets, said tariffs would stoke inflationary pressures and hinder consumer spending, while an immigration crackdown could slow the supply of workers and cause the employment rate to go down.

“I don’t think that’s a great backdrop in 2025,” Cohen said at iConnections Global Alts conference Tuesday. “I would expect the markets to top over the next couple months, if it hasn’t already topped already, and I would expect the second half to be a little tougher.”

Despite his cautious view on the overall market near term, Cohen remains optimistic about investing around artificial intelligence in the decades ahead.

— Yun Li

Stifel downgrades Datadog, projecting slower growth from OpenAI contract

Cloud company Datadog is likely to see diminishing growth from its relationship with OpenAI, and that lowers the upside for the stock, according to Stifel.

Analyst Brad Reback downgraded Datadog to hold from buy, writing in a note that the company could see slowing revenue growth and shrinking operating margins in 2025. Part of that is because of the company’s relationship with ChatGPT parent OpenAI.

“While checks point to OpenAI renewing its DDOG contract for another year, we believe the company has been able to meaningfully optimize its DDOG usage, creating an appreciable growth headwind in FY25 that is likely felt most acutely in 1Q on a Q/Q basis,” Reback wrote.

The analyst also said the stock, which is up 6% in January, has a “fairly full valuation.”

Shares of Datadog were down 2% in premarket trading Wednesday.

— Jesse Pound

Alibaba shares rise

Alibaba shares popped 3% in the premarket Wednesday following the release of a new version of its artificial intelligence model Qwen that the Chinese tech giant said surpasses DeepSeek.

“We have been building Qwen2.5-Max, a large MoE LLM pretrained on massive data and post-trained with curated SFT and RLHF recipes,” read a post on X from Qwen. “It achieves competitive performance against the top-tier models, and outcompetes DeepSeek V3 in benchmarks like Arena Hard, LiveBench, LiveCodeBench, GPQA-Diamond.”

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Alibaba

Nvidia slips after big gains in previous session

Nvidia shares dipped 0.7%, a day after the the chipmaker rallied to recover some of the steep losses suffered on Monday. Week to date, the stock is down more than 9% after the DeepSeek-sparked sell-off to start the week.

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NVDA 5-day chart

Japan and Aussie stocks rise as Wall Street stages a sharp recovery; most Asia markets closed for holiday

Japan and Australian stocks rose Wednesday as Wall Street rebounded overnight, while several Asia-Pacific markets were closed for the Lunar New Year holiday.

Japan benchmark Nikkei 225 ended the day up 1.02% at 39,414.78, while the Topix advanced 0.68% to close at 2,775.59. Japanese tech stocks rebounded after posting losses for several days. Advantest gained 4.36%, Tokyo Electron rose 2.34%, while SoftBank Group rose 2.43%.

Minutes from the Bank of Japan’s December meeting released Wednesday showed members discussed neutral interest rates. The BOJ has been debating how far borrowing costs should be raised as inflation remains above its 2% target while wage hikes broaden due to labor shortages.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 rose 0.57% to close at its highest since Dec. 5 at 8,447.

The country’s inflation rose 0.2% in the December quarter and 2.4% annually, below the 2.5% estimated by economists polled by Reuters, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed.

— Amala Balakrishner

Broad indexes would suffer in 2025 if tech falters, but average stock hold up, Capital Economics says

Broad stock market indexes would suffer in 2025 if Big Tech leaders continue to falter but the average stock is likely to “hold up well,” according to Capital Economics senior markets economist James Reilly.

Although the S&P 500 Information Technology Index slid 5.5% Monday, its largest one-day decline since 2020, “the losses were largely confined to firms that had been expected to play a key role in facilitating AI, including semiconductor firms and utilities firms powering data centers,” London-based Capital Economics said, noting the S&P 500 only fell 1.5% and roughly 70% of companies in the index rose.

One possibility is that investors will start to favor more of the users of artificial intelligence and fewer of the “enablers,” which may have already begun before Monday, Reilly wrote. “In this scenario, the S&P 500 could rally further even as sentiment towards these prior favorites cooled. Indeed, something similar happened during the dotcom bubble — there was a rotation within the I.T. sector (from the largest firms) around 1999/2000 that didn’t undermine the S&P 500 index.”

Strangely, the large share of the market accounted for by the 10 biggest stocks offers some hope. “That might mean that the losses as these gains unwound would be similarly concentrated, affording plenty of scope for the average firm in the S&P 500 to do well if the economic backdrop stayed positive, as we expect,” Reilly noted.

— Scott Schnipper

Stocks making the biggest moves after hours

Check out some of the companies making headlines in extended trading:

  • Starbucks — The coffee chain gained more than 2% after better-than-expected quarterly results. Starbucks notched fiscal first-quarter earnings of 69 cents per share on revenue of $9.40 billion, while analysts polled by LSEG were looking for 67 cents in earnings per share and $9.31 billion in revenue. Same-store sales declined for the fourth consecutive quarter, however.
  • F5 — The application security company surged 12% after the firm issued a better-than-expected revenue outlook for the second quarter. F5 forecasts revenue in the current quarter to be in the range between $705 million and $725 million, while analysts polled by FactSet were expecting $702.7 million.
  • Qorvo — The semiconductor company gained 12% on the heels of an upbeat fourth-quarter outlook. Qorvo expects revenue in the current quarter of $850 million, compared to a forecast of $841 million from analysts polled by LSEG. The company’s adjusted earnings per share forecast of $1 was also above estimates that called for 86 cents per share.

Read the full list here.

— Brian Evans

Stock futures open lower

Stock futures were marginally lower on Tuesday as investors look toward the first Federal Reserve interest rate decision of 2025.

Futures tied to the Dow Jones Industrial Average ticked down 23 points, or 0.05%. Nasdaq 100 futures pulled back 0.1% alongside S&P 500 futures.

— Brian Evans

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