Wall Street holds steadier as chip companies swing back upward

Wall Street futures were rising in premarket trading Monday and oil prices retreated, but not before a gallon of gas in the U.S. breached the $4 level again.

Futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.6%, while Nasdaq futures jumped 1.1%. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, coming off its worst week since March, reversed course from losses to a gain of 0.4%.

Domino's jumped more than 7% after the pizza delivery giant beat second-quarter revenue projections and announced another round of stock buybacks. The company fell short of Wall Street's profit targets, even as its net income grew 3.6% over the same period last year.

AMC soared close to 15% in off-hours trading after the movie theater chain posted record second-quarter sales and profit. Those figures didn't even include the past weekend, when the 106-year-old theater company said 4.3 million people watched “The Odyssey” in its theaters. Six of its theaters even ran the Christopher Nolan-directed historical epic non-stop over the weekend — 85 hours straight — to meet demand.

Oil prices flipped from gains to losses as the U.S. and Iran moved closer to resuming an all-out war. Early Monday, the U.S. announced more attacks for a ninth straight night. Iran has been responding to U.S. strikes by hitting U.S. allies across the Middle East.

Brent crude, the international standard, fell $1.64 to $86.46 per barrel but still remained much higher than prewar levels. Benchmark U.S. crude dropped $1.87 to $79.91 per barrel.

“The U.S. and Iran continue to exchange strikes, which are proving to be deadly for both sides,” ING commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey wrote in a commentary Monday. “If this escalation goes unchecked, we could return to an environment of wide-scale attacks across the Persian Gulf.”

Tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, a crucial waterway for global oil transport, has nearly ground to a halt, adding to pressures on supplies, they noted. On Monday, U.S. gas prices again surged to an average of $4 a gallon.

“The return to war in the Strait of Hormuz may start to weigh more heavily on financial markets before too long, especially if even strong tech earnings reports continue to be met with skepticism,” Jonas Goltermann, chief markets economist at Capital Economics wrote in a note Monday.

Markets were also shaken by the rollout of another powerful Chinese AI model, this time by Beijing-based Moonshot AI.

The impact of the new Kimi K3 open-source AI model was similar to when China’s “ DeepSeek moment” rattled world markets in early 2025. It was viewed as another sign of how lower-cost, capable Chinese AI models are increasingly challenging rivals like Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT.

At midday in Europe, Britain’s FTSE 100 fell 0.4%, France’s CAC 40 was up 0.6% as was Germany’s DAX.

In Asia, Japan’s markets were closed Monday for a holiday. South Korea's Kospi, which has benefited substantially from the global AI frenzy, sank 4.5% to 6,516.27. Two of its most valuable stocks booked losses. Samsung Electronics lost 4.3%, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix fell 4.2%.

Taiwan’s Taiex, also heavy in AI-related stocks, was 0.5% lower as its leading chipmaker, TSMC, or Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co., climbed 1.3%. It had fallen 7.3% on Friday after the company announced it plans to spend an additional $100 billion to expand its chipmaking capacity in the U.S.

Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 2.4% to 25,143.05, while the Shanghai Composite index traded 0.9% higher at 3,796.28.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell less than 0.1% to 8,791.30. India's Sensex slipped 0.6%.