Wall Street Today: DJIA Sets Record as CAT, MRK, UNH Rise, But AAPL and MSFT Woes Beat MU Strength

The Dow industrials hit an all-time intraday high Thursday as Caterpillar, Merck and other non-tech blue chips rose, but the broader S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite fell as Apple and Microsoft weakness outweighed Micron's rally on well-received earnings.

The $Dow Jones Industrial Average (.DJI.US)$ rose as much as 1.6% to a 52,655.66 intraday record before pulling back to end 71.72 points higher (0.1%) at 51,920.62.

That meant the Dow failed to finish above its 51,999.67 all-time closing high set on June 16.

Meanwhile, the tech-heavy $Nasdaq Composite Index (.IXIC.US)$ shed 118.03 ticks (0.5%) to 25,358.60, while the $S&P 500 Index (.SPX.US)$ eased 0.73 points (0.01%) to 7,357.49.

Both had been positive earlier in the day in part on strength for Micron and select other Big Techs.

Macro

The Dow rose partly on strength for non-tech giants $Caterpillar (CAT.US)$ (up 6.3%), $Merck & Co (MRK.US)$ (4% better on a deal to buy $Bio-Techne (TECH.US)$ for $11.3 billion) and $UnitedHealth (UNH.US)$ (2.4% firmer).

The non-techs appeared to rise in part on a May Personal Consumption Expenditures report that came in as analysts had expected.

The PCE report – the Federal Reserve's favorite inflation measure – showed U.S. prices rising at a 4.1% seasonally adjusted annual rate last month. That's the highest level since April 2023 and well above the Fed's 2% long-term target, but matched what economists had expected.

Stock investors tend to prefer tame inflation because that can lead to the Fed cutting interest rates or at least not raising them. Lower rates historically favor stocks by keeping a lid on bond and money-market yields.

The non-tech Dow components also gained ground as some investors likely moved away from tech stocks that have recently been trading at or near all-time highs on optimism for the artificial-intelligence build-out.

That offset losses by the Dow's major tech components, including$Apple (AAPL.US)$ (which fell 6.1%), $Microsoft (MSFT.US)$ (3.5% weaker), $Amazon (AMZN.US)$ (3.1% softer) and $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ (down 1.6%).

Apple fell on word of planned price hikes to MacBooks and iPads due to rising chip costs amid a worldwide run on semiconductors sparked by the AI boom.

Microsoft eased on similarly disclosed price increases to its Xbox game consoles.

Weakness for such large techs helped send several other tech stocks lower – including multiple ones not necessarily in the DJIA, but typically in the S&P 500, the Nasdaq Composite or both.

Decliners included $Cerebras Systems (CBRS.US)$ (off 7.5%), $Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI.US)$ and $Dell Technologies (DELL.US)$ (both down 5.7%), $Palantir (PLTR.US)$ (5.5% weaker) and $Oracle (ORCL.US)$ (3.2% softer).

Such losses outweighed a 15.7% gain for $Micron Technology (MU.US)$ that followed the semiconductor giant's release late Wednesday of well-regarded quarterly earnings.

Micron's strong results boosted select techs mostly tied to making semiconductors, chips or other computer components.

Big Techs to rise in sympathy with Micron included $SanDisk (SNDK.US)$ (up 22%), $Corning (GLW.US)$ (10.8% better), $Western Digital (WDC.US)$ (4.9% firmer), $Qualcomm (QCOM.US)$ (which added 3.8%), $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$ (up 2.5%) and $Intel (INTC.US)$ (0.9% stronger).

In fact, Micron and Corning both hit all-time intraday highs earlier in the session, as did Caterpillar.

Elsewhere in markets, $Bitcoin (BTC.CC)$ sank to its lowest intraday levels since September 2024 on some exchanges before partly recovering.

BTC fell as much as 4.7% to a $58,121.68 21-month low before bouncing back. The crypto was trading just 0.2% lower at $59,593.50 as of about 4:15 p.m. New York time, while $Ethereum (ETH.CC)$ was 0.6% lower at $1,566.20 and $Ripple (XRP.CC)$eased 1.7% to $1.04.

However, $Solana (SOL.CC)$bucked the trend and rose 1% to $66.48 as of that hour.

Moo-vers

The "Magnificent Seven" stocks took their cue from the Nasdaq Composite and all finished Thursday's session lower.

$Apple (AAPL.US)$, $Microsoft (MSFT.US)$, $Amazon (AMZN.US)$ and $NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ all suffered previously noted declines of 6.2%, 3.5%, 3.1% and 1.6%, respectively.

As for the rest of the Mag-7, $Meta Platforms (META.US)$ shed 2.7%, $Alphabet-A (GOOGL.US)$ lost 0.5% and $Tesla (TSLA.US)$ eased 0.1%.

Beyond the Mag-7, Thursday's noteworthy percentage decliners included:

-- Select crypto-related stocks, which eased on cryptocurrencies' underlying weakness. Losers included $Strategy (MSTR.US)$ (down 9.4%), $Coinbase (COIN.US)$ (5.1% weaker), $Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR.US)$ (off 5%), $Robinhood (HOOD.US)$ (3.9% softer) and $Circle (CRCL.US)$ (which lost 3.1%).

-- $The Wendy's Co (WEN.US)$, down 6.7%. The restaurant chain gave back part of a 25.6% rally it enjoyed Tuesday on a new executive hire and meme-stock-like attention from Reddit's WallStreetBets chat group.

-- Certain space stocks, which have been rising and falling ever since SpaceX's initial public offering on June 12. $Rocket Lab (RKLB.US)$ lost 5.5% Thursday, while $AST SpaceMobile (ASTS.US)$ shed 3.5% and $SpaceX (SPCX.US)$ itself gave back 1%.

Conversely, Thursday's major percentage winners included:

-- $BlackBerry (BB.US)$, which rose 20%. BB rallied after its fiscal Q1 revenue and adjusted earnings beat expectations and the Canadian communications-services firm boosted full-year guidance.

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