A late-day decline in semiconductor stocks caused a split session for Wall Street, highlighting sector-specific vulnerabilities ahead of key earnings and economic data releases.
Late trading on Monday left Wall Street with a split screen: the Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.34% to 26,092.29, while the Nasdaq 100 fell twice as fast, down 0.64% to 29,122.03, according to market summaries from CNBC and Reuters. The S&P 500 edged down 0.12%, but the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 0.26%, underlining how uneven the session was across the major US benchmarks.
The weakness was concentrated in semiconductors. The PHLX Semiconductor Index dropped 2.57% to 11,438.92, and Reuters reported that the sell-off was driven mainly by large chip and memory names. That matters because the Nasdaq 100, which is weighted towards the biggest non-financial technology companies, is more sensitive to sharp moves in a handful of giant stocks than the broader composite.
That distinction showed up in the day’s stock-level action. Among the largest Nasdaq constituents sampled shortly after midday in New York, more names were up than down, and the median move was only a slight decline. Costco, Alphabet, Amazon, Booking Holdings, Mondelez and Microsoft were among the better performers, while SanDisk, Micron Technology, AMD, Lam Research and Intel were among the weakest. The pattern suggests that the index’s fall was not a broad retreat, but a heavy drag from a narrow group of large semiconductor-related shares.
The timing also made the sector vulnerable. Investors were positioning ahead of Nvidia’s second-quarter results, the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole gathering and the release of the July personal consumption expenditures inflation reading later in the week. That combination left chip stocks, which have benefited from strong artificial-intelligence demand and tight capacity in memory markets, especially exposed to profit-taking. Even so, the wider market did not show signs of panic: volatility in the S&P 500 remained comparatively subdued, while technology hedging costs stayed higher than the broader market, pointing to concentrated rather than systemic stress.
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