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It was another rough day for tech stocks, and the broader market felt it too. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 1.07% to close at 46,091.74, while the S&P 500 eased 0.8% to 6,617.32. The Nasdaq took the hardest hit, dropping 1.21% to 22,432.84 as the tech downturn continued to intensify.
Here's a closer look at five stocks that captured investors' attention today, for better or worse.
Nvidia shares fell 2.81%, closing at $181.36. The stock traded between an intraday high of $184.80 and a low of $179.65, within its 52-week range of $86.63 to $212.19.
Despite the decline, analyst Ruben Roy from Stifel maintained his Buy rating on the chip giant, actually raising his price target to $250. The reason? A significant backlog that Roy believes could drive long-term success. He expects Jensen Huang's company to beat third-quarter estimates and issue strong fourth-quarter guidance when it reports earnings Wednesday after the market closes. The catch: Roy warns that near-term upside may already be baked into the current price.
But here's the real story. With AI compute demand still surging, Roy says Nvidia remains best positioned in a market that could exceed $100 billion by 2025 and potentially approach $1 trillion over the long term. That's the kind of total addressable market that makes investors sit up and pay attention.
Home Depot had a significantly worse day, with shares plunging 6.02% to close at $336.48. The stock hit an intraday high of $348.80 before sliding to a low of $336.01, now trading near the bottom of its 52-week range of $326.31 to $439.37.
The home improvement retailer cut its full-year profit outlook after posting weaker-than-expected third-quarter demand. Company executives pointed to cautious consumers and a housing market stuck at 40-year lows in turnover. Big-ticket projects tied to financing remained particularly soft as inflation and affordability concerns kept customers hesitant to pull the trigger on major purchases.
The kicker? Management doesn't expect underlying demand to improve in the near term. When a company like Home Depot signals that kind of caution about the housing market, it tends to reverberate beyond just the home improvement sector.
Cloudflare shares decreased 2.83%, ending the day at $196.53. The stock hit an intraday high of $200.54 before pulling back to a low of $187.48, within its 52-week range of $89.42 to $260.
The culprit? A global outage that briefly took major platforms offline and triggered a negative market reaction. Users couldn't access services including OpenAI's ChatGPT, with disruption reports approaching 2,000. But Elon Musk's platform X was hit even harder, with nearly 13,000 disruption reports at the peak, according to Downdetector.
For a company whose entire value proposition is keeping websites and services up and running, an outage like this is about as bad as it gets from a perception standpoint. The market reacted accordingly.
Plug Power actually rose during regular trading hours, climbing 2.64% to close at $2.14. The stock traded between an intraday high of $2.29 and a low of $1.99, within its 52-week range of $0.69 to $4.58.
But then came the after-hours news, and things got ugly fast. The stock plunged nearly 21% to $1.69 in extended trading after the company announced a $375 million private offering of convertible senior notes due 2033, with an option to sell an additional $56.25 million.
Plug Power plans to use most of the proceeds to repay high-interest debt and repurchase existing notes, with the remainder earmarked for general corporate purposes. Dilution concerns likely drove the after-hours selloff, a common reaction when companies announce convertible note offerings.
Amazon shares fell 4.43%, closing at $222.55. The stock traded between an intraday high of $230.20 and a low of $222.42, within its 52-week range of $161.43 to $258.60.
The e-commerce and cloud giant was downgraded by Rothschild & Co from Buy to Neutral, though the firm maintained a price target of $250. Analyst Alexander Haissl warned that generative AI's weaker pricing power and higher capital intensity raise the risk of overbuilding infrastructure at companies like Amazon.
He noted that current AI margins rely on longer depreciation schedules, which adds to investor caution. It's an interesting concern: what if the massive infrastructure buildout for AI doesn't generate the returns everyone expects? That's the kind of question that can weigh on even the biggest tech names.
For what it's worth, Nvidia stock currently has Momentum in the 83rd percentile according to market analytics, suggesting strong recent performance despite today's pullback.
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