The S&P 500 closed a choppy session nearly unchanged on Monday, weighed down by megacaps as investors awaited several catalysts including key economic data and earnings from some of the largest U.S. companies.

Market Snapshot

The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 114.09 points, or 0.28%, to 40,227.59, the S&P 500 rose 3.54 points, or 0.06%, to 5,528.75 and the Nasdaq Composite lost 16.81 points, or 0.10%, to 17,366.13.

Market Movers

Tesla rose 0.3% to $285.88 to extend its winning streak to five days. Shares of the electric-vehicle maker closed above their 50-day moving average on Friday. Tesla reported earnings on Tuesday evening, and despite a disappointing first-quarter print, the stock rose after CEO Elon Musk said he would spend less time in Washington, D.C., and more time at Tesla headquarters. A positive reaction to earnings has brought $300 into play, said ChartSmarter founder and market technician Douglas Busch, who sees a "decent chance" the stock can rise as high as $360.

NXP Semiconductors stock fell over 7% in after-hours trading. NXP Semiconductors NV announced a new chief executive officer as part of its quarterly earnings report and warned that the chipmaker was navigating “a very uncertain environment” due to tariffs.

Palantir stock jumped 1.7% on Monday. Palantir is up 51.6% in 2025 as of April 28 after spiking 340.5% for all of 204. The government and commercial data analytics firm surged 20.3% last week. Shares have nearly doubled since hitting 66.12 intraday on April 7. PLTR stock broke out past a 98.17 double-bottom base buy point last Wednesday and continued to power higher.

Domino's Pizza rose 0.6% on a mixed first-quarter print. The fast-food pizza chain posted revenue of $1.1 billion, narrowly missing the $1.3 billion that analysts expected, according to FactSet. Earnings of $4.33 a share topped the $4.06 a share Wall Street was anticipating. The company didn't provide an outlook for 2025. While inflation and recession fears have caused restaurant stocks to waver as of late, Domino's large international exposure has made it a safer bet than domestically centered U.S. chains.

Nvidia was down 2.1%. Shares fell on a report that Huawei Technologies has developed a new chip called the Ascend 910D, hoping it would be more powerful than Nvidia's H100. The artificial intelligence giant's market in China was already set to shrink after the Trump administration said it would impose license requirements on future sales of its H20 accelerators, which were specifically designed to meet U.S. sanctions on Chinese AI exports. The stock closed up 4.3% on Friday.

Spirit AeroSystems rose 2.6% after finalizing a deal to transfer some of its assets to Airbus. These include a plant in North Carolina where Spirit makes a crucial part of the fuselage for the A350 jet, and a plant in Northern Ireland that makes carbon-fiber wings for the A220.

IBM was up 1.6% after pledging a $150 billion investment over the next five years to aid the development of technology in the U.S. The company said it would invest more than $30 billion in research and development to continue its domestic manufacturing of mainframe and quantum computers.

Regeneron Pharmaceuticals was up 1.4%. The biotech said the European Commission had granted conditional marketing approval of Lynozyfic to treat adults with relapsed and refractory multiple myeloma, a type of blood cancer.

Novavax climbed 0.5% after the vaccine maker released a statement addressing the U.S. Food and Drug Administration's request for Novavax to conduct another clinical trial for its Covid-19 vaccine. So-called postmarketing commitments are "not unusual," and many approved drugs have at least one PMC, the company said.

Wolfspeed stock surged 26% to $4.13 ahead of fiscal third-quarter earnings, which are set to be released next week. Stocks in the semiconductor industry have seen a heightened level of short interest, according to Raymond James. Analysts with the firm noted that Wolfspeed topped the list of stocks with the largest short-interest ratio, at 41%.

MicroStrategy rose 0.2%. The world's largest corporate holder of Bitcoin revealed Monday that it had snapped up even more cryptocurrency. In the period between April 21 and April 27, the company, which does business as Strategy, purchased 15,355 Bitcoins for $1.42 billion, or roughly $92,737 each. The stock followed the market and the price of Bitcoin lower. The digital currency was down 0.7% over the past 24 hours to $93,802, according to CoinDesk data.

Market News

Trump to Soften Blow of Automotive Tariffs

President Trump is expected to soften the impact of his automotive tariffs, preventing duties on foreign-made cars from stacking on top of other tariffs he has imposed and easing some levies on foreign parts used to manufacture cars in the U.S., according to people familiar with the matter.

The decision will mean that automakers paying Trump’s automotive tariffs won’t also be charged for other duties, such as those on steel and aluminum, according to people familiar with the policy. The move would be retroactive, the people said, meaning that automakers could be reimbursed for such tariffs already paid. The 25% tariff on finished foreign-made cars went into effect early this month.

The administration will also modify its tariffs on foreign auto parts—slated to be 25% and effective May 3—allowing automakers to be reimbursed for those tariffs up to an amount equal to 3.75% of the value of a U.S.-made car for one year. The reimbursement would fall to 2.75% of the car’s value in a second year, and then be phased out altogether.

Alibaba Unveils Qwen 3, a Family of "Hybrid" AI Reasoning Models

Chinese tech company Alibaba on Monday released Qwen 3, a family of AI models the company claims matches and in some cases outperforms the best models available from Google and OpenAI.

Most of the models are — or soon will be — available for download under an “open” license from AI dev platform Hugging Face and GitHub. They range in size from 0.6 billion parameters to 235 billion parameters. Parameters roughly correspond to a model’s problem-solving skills, and models with more parameters generally perform better than those with fewer parameters.

The rise of China-originated model series like Qwen have increased the pressure on American labs such as OpenAI to deliver more capable AI technologies. They’ve also led policymakers to implement restrictions aimed at limiting the ability of Chinese AI companies to obtain the chips necessary to train models.