Wall Street’s lull stretches to a second day as indexes finish mixed

NEW YORK —  Wall Street’s lull stretched into a second day as U.S. stocks drifted to a mixed close on a quiet Wednesday.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 finished virtually unchanged after flipping between modest gains and losses through the day. It edged down by 0.03 of a point to 5,187.67. It was coming off a slight gain from Tuesday, which followed a big three-day winning streak.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose 172.13 points, or 0.4%, to 39,056.39, and the Nasdaq composite slipped 29.80, or 0.2%, to 16,302.76.

Uber Technologies slumped 5.7% after reporting worse results for the first quarter of 2024 than analysts expected. The ride-hailing company also gave a forecast range for bookings in the current quarter whose midpoint fell below analysts’ estimates.

Shopify tumbled 18.6% despite reporting better profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. The company, which helps businesses sell things online, said that its revenue growth would probably slow this quarter and that it would probably make less profit off each $1 in revenue.

Match Group sank 5.4% despite topping profit expectations. The company behind Tinder, Hinge and other apps for connecting people with one another gave a forecast for revenue in the current quarter that fell short of analysts’ expectations. It said its efforts to make Tinder better for women and Gen Z customers in particular have hurt some performance measurements in the short term.

Intel fell 2.2% after saying the U.S. Commerce Department revoked licenses for exports to a Chinese customer. That could cause the chip maker’s revenue for the current quarter to fall below the midpoint of the forecast range it had earlier given.

On the winning side of Wall Street, Lyft revved 7.1% higher after it topped expectations for profit and revenue. It said growth was particularly strong for early-morning, commute and weekend-evening trips.

Reddit was another winner and rose 4% after delivering its first quarterly report as a publicly traded company. It posted a milder loss and better revenue than expected, while giving a stronger-than-expected forecast for revenue in the current quarter.

Computer networking company Arista Networks climbed 6.5% for the biggest gain in the S&P 500 after topping expectations for profit and revenue.

Most companies have been reporting stronger profits for the start of the year than analysts expected. That and newly revived hopes for coming cuts to interest rates by the Federal Reserve have helped the U.S. stock market to recover from its rough April.

Treasury yields have largely been easing since Federal Reserve Chair Jerome H. Powell said last week that it remains closer to cutting its main interest rate than hiking it, despite a string of stubbornly high readings on inflation this year. A cooler-than-expected jobs report Friday, meanwhile, suggested the U.S. economy could pull off the balancing act of staying solid enough to avoid a bad recession without being so strong that it keeps inflation too high.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury recovered some of those losses. It rose to 4.49% from 4.46% late Tuesday.

The yield on the two-year Treasury, which moves closer with expectations for action by the Fed, ticked up to 4.84% from 4.83%.

The stock market also found some support after April’s weakness as companies bought back more shares of their own stock, said Mark Hackett, chief of investment research at Nationwide. He said the market’s zigzag pattern since March “is likely to remain as we search for a catalyst.”

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell across much of Asia. Japan’s Nikkei 225 dropped 1.6% after Nintendo forecast that its net profit would fall in the coming fiscal year and announced that news of a successor product to its popular Switch device will be made by March.

Stock indexes rose modestly in Europe.

Choe writes for the Associated Press