Stock Market Today: Dow Jones finds the green as S&P hits fresh highs, Nvidia extends rally but hesitates

Dow Jones Industrial Average held onto Friday's gains.
Nvidia shares pushed higher on Friday before falling back.
S&P 500 touched new all-time highs above 5,100 before ending close to flat.

The S&P 500 (SPX) index was broadly unchanged to close the session at 5,088.8. The Dow Jones (DJIA) climbed 0.16% to end at 39,131.53, while the Nasdaq (IXIC) lost 0.28% to finish at 15,996.82.

What to know after the Friday close

The Technology Sector started off the day as the best-performing major S&P 500 sector on Friday, rising nearly 1% before falling back to end the day down 0.27%. The Utilities Sector rose 0.71% to become Friday's best-performing sector, and the Energy Sector was the lamest dog in the race to wrap up the trading week, down 0.58% at the closing bell.
Palo Alto Network (PANW) gained 5.328% on Friday, ending at $282.09 while Mercado Linbre Inc (MELI) on the NASDAQ tumbled 10.378% as the biggest loser on Friday, closing at $1,629.32.
Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) initially gained more than 3% on Friday to trade near $823.68 before pulling back in the back half of the trading day to finish at $788.17, up around 0.36% at the closing bell. The chipmaker had reported on Wednesday that earnings per share topped $5.16 versus the $4.64 forecast, while revenue climbed to $22.10 billion compared to the expected $20.62 billion. The company also said that it forecasts the current-quarter revenue of $24 billion, plus or minus 2%.
Mizuho has raised the target price for Nvidia stock to $850 from $825, HSBC lifted its target to $880 from $835 and Citigroup revised its expectation to $820 from $575.
ETSY Inc. (ETSY) tumbled 8.44% to close at $70.62 as the worst-performing S&P 500 stock on Thursday.
The US Department of Labor reported that there were 201,000 Initial Jobless Claims in the week ending February 17, a 12,000 decrease from the previous week's reading of 213,000.
Federal Reserve (Fed) Vice Chair Philip Jefferson said on Thursday that he wants to move in a way that would not lead to stops and starts in policy and increase policy uncertainty. Later in the day, Governor Christopher Waller argued that there is no rush to begin cutting interest rates, citing the need to see further evidence that inflation is cooling.
The Fed said in the Minutes of the January policy meeting released Wednesday that most policymakers noted the risks associated with moving too quickly to ease the policy. Furthermore, the publication showed that officials highlighted uncertainty around how long the restrictive policy stance would be needed.
Retailer giant Walmart Inc. (WMT) reported an adjusted earning per share of $1.8 ahead of the opening bell on Tuesday. The company said that it expects consolidated net sales to rise in the range of 3%-4% and announced that it will buy smart TV producer Vizio (VZIO) for about $2.3 billion.
Home Depot Inc. (HD) said net income in Q4 was $2.8 billion, and the adjusted earnings per share was $2.82. The company, however, said that it projects sales for the fiscal year 2024 to be below estimates, citing slowing demand for discretionary items such as flooring, furniture and kitchen, per Reuters.

Nvidia FAQs

What is Nvidia known for?

Nvidia is the leading fabless designer of graphics processing units or GPUs. These sophisticated devices allow computers to better process graphics for display interfaces by accelerating computer memory and RAM. This is especially true in the world of video games, where Nvidia graphics cards became a mainstay of the industry. Additionally, Nvidia is well-known as the creator of its CUDA API that allows developers to create software for a number of industries using its parallel computing platform. Nvidia chips are leading products in the data center, supercomputing and artificial intelligence industries. The company is also viewed as one of the inventors of the system-on-a-chip design.

What is the history of Nvidia?

Current CEO Jensen Huang founded Nvidia with Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem in 1993. All three founders were semiconductor engineers, who had previously worked at AMD, Sun Microsystems, IBM and Hewlett-Packard. The team set out to build more proficient GPUs than currently existed in the market and largely succeeded by late 1990s. The company was founded with $40,000 but secured $20 million in funding from Sequoia Capital venture fund early on. Nvidia went public in 1999 under the ticker NVDA. Nvidia became a leading designer of chips to the data center, PC, automotive and mobile markets through its close relationship with Taiwan Semiconductor.

What is Nvidia’s relationship to artificial intelligence?

In 2022, Nvidia released its ninth-generation data center GPU called the H100. This GPU is specifically designed with the needs of artificial intelligence applications in mind. For instance, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and GPT-4 large language models (LLMs) rely on the H100’s high efficiency in parallel processing to execute a high number of commands quickly. The chip is said to speed up networks by six times Nvidia’s previous A100 chip and is based on the new Hopper architecture. The H100 chip contains 80 billion transistors. Nvidia’s market cap reached $1 trillion in May 2023 largely on the promise of its H100 chip becoming the “picks and shovels” of the coming AI revolution.

Why does Jensen Huang have a cult following?

Long-time CEO Jense Huang has a cult following in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street due to his strict loyalty and determination to build Nvidia into one of the world’s leading companies. Nvidia neary fell apart on several occasions, but each time Huang bet everything on a new technology that turned out to be the ticket to the company’s success. Huang is seen as a visionary in Silicon Valley, and his company is at the forefront of most major breakthroughs in computer processing. Huang is known for his enthusiastic keynote addresses at annual Nvidia GTC conferences, as well as his love of black leather jackets and Denny’s, the fast food chain where the company was founded.

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