U.S. stocks bounced around their records on Wednesday after the Federal Reserve made moves to boost the job market but also warned that more help isn’t guaranteed.
The S&P 500 finished virtually flat and edged down by less than 0.1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 73 points, or 0.2%, and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.5%. All three indexes were coming off an all-time high.
Stocks had been on track for modest gains in the afternoon after the Fed cut its main interest rate for the second time this year in hopes of helping the slowing job market. But the market snapped lower after Chair Jerome Powell later warned that it “is not a foregone conclusion” that the Fed will cut again in December at its next meeting, “far from it.”
“That needs to be taken off the board,” Powell said.
The warning hit Wall Street because traders saw a cut in December as a near certainty, along with potentially more in 2026. and they had already driven stock prices to records in part because of it. Powell said officials had “strongly differing views about how to proceed in December.”
Even Wednesday’s decision to cut came with less authority than expected. One member of the Fed’s committee, Jeffrey Schmid, voted to keep the federal funds rate steady now instead of lowering it.
In the meantime, the deluge continued of big U.S. companies reporting how much profit they made during the summer, and the frenzy in artificial-intelligence technology is driving growth. The pressure is on companies to deliver gains because that’s one way they can quiet criticism that their stock prices have shot too high.
Teradyne soared 20.5% for the biggest gain in the S&P 500 after the company, which makes automated test equipment and advanced robotics systems, reported stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. CEO Greg Smith credited strength related to artificial-intelligence applications and said “AI-related test demand remains robust.”
Nvidia, meanwhile, climbed 3%. The poster child of the AI boom became the first company valued at $5 trillion on Wall Street, just three months after it was the first to break through the $4 trillion barrier.
