Wall Street drifts as Alphabet rallies and Nvidia sinks

Alphabet was the strongest force pushing upward on the market. It rose 5% in the first chance for traders to buy its stock since Berkshire Hathaway said it built a $4.34 billion ownership stake in Google’s parent company. Berkshire Hathaway, run by famed investor Warren Buffett, is notorious for trying to buy stocks only when they look like good values while avoiding anything that looks too expensive.

Such discipline has become a much hotter topic on Wall Street recently. Critics have been warning that the U.S. stock market could be primed for a drop because of how high prices have shot since April, leaving them looking too expensive. Critics point in particular to stocks swept up in the AI mania, which have been surging at spectacular speeds for years.

The company at the center of the frenzy, Nvidia, fell another 1.3% Monday, following swings of at least 1.8% in eight of the last 10 days. It’s nevertheless still up nearly 40% for the year so far after it doubled in price in four of the last five years.

That has Wall Street’s spotlight on Wednesday, when Nvidia will report how much profit it made during the summer. AI stocks have surged as much as they have because of expectations that they’ll produce huge growth in profits. If they fail to meet analysts’ expectations, that would undercut one of the big assumptions that’s driven the U.S. stock market to records.

Such high expectations extend beyond tech stocks, even if they are toughest for AI darlings.

Aramark fell 4.2% after the company, which offers food and facilities management for schools, national parks and convention centers, reported a profit for the latest quarter that fell short of analysts’ expectations. It also said it expects an underlying measure of profit to grow between 20% and 25% this upcoming year. While relatively strong, that was less than what analysts had been forecasting.

Another source of potential disappointment for Wall Street is what the Federal Reserve does with interest rates. The expectation had been that the Fed would keep cutting interest rates in hopes of shoring up the slowing job market. Wall Street loves lower rates because they can give the economy and prices for investments a boost.

But questions are rising about whether a third cut for the year will actually come at the Fed’s next meeting in December, something that traders had earlier seen as very likely. The downside of lower interest rates is that they can make inflation worse, and inflation has stubbornly remained above the Fed’s 2% target.

Fed officials have pointed to the U.S. government’s shutdown, which delayed the release of updates on the job market and other signals about the economy. With less information and less certainty about how things are going, some Fed officials have suggested it may be better just to wait in December to get more clarity.

Now that the shutdown is over, the government is preparing to release September’s delayed jobs report on Thursday. That could create further swings for the market. Data that's very strong would likely stay the Fed’s hand on rate cuts, while figures that are very weak would raise worries about the economy.

In 2026, the Fed is likely to cut interest rates only in response to a slowing economy instead of trying to cut ahead of it, according to Barry Bannister, chief equity strategist at Stifel. That's not as good an environment for stock prices, and Bannister said the “Fed’s ‘free lunch’ is over.”

In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury edged down to 4.13% from 4.14% late Friday.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell modestly across much of Europe and Asia.

Tokyo’s Nikkei 225 slipped 0.1% after the government reported that the Japanese economy contracted at a 1.8% annual pace in the July-September quarter.

South Korea’s Kospi was an outlier and jumped 1.9% as tech-related stocks there did well.

AP Business Writers Matt Ott and Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.