Latest stock news trends show volatile trading on Wall Street Wednesday sending the main indexes down with semiconductor stocks dropping the most.

Latest stock news: Earnings drag

The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index tumbled 1.7%, led by chipmaker Nvidia’s 1.7% decline.

Earnings-related news also dragged Wall Street lower – insurance giant Travelers saw its stock plummet 8.2% after the company missed earnings expectations.

Stock news: JB Hunt drops

The stock news mood spread to other areas as well: shares in JB Hunt Transport Services plummeted after the shipping company fell short of the quarterly financial target while U S Bancorp also plunged as another bank missed its own quarterly results.

Latest stock trends: Big Banks, Big profits

Abbott Laboratories also saw its shares fall after giving an outlook that ‘fell short of expectations’, to borrow a popular phrase from journalists.

Same goes for Prologis, which saw its shares fall after ‘offering a gloomier-than-expected forecast’.

Stock news: Monetary policy restrictive

Investor confidence was rocked by remarks from Federal Reserve officials, Chair Jerome Powell to New York Fed president John Williams. The pair underscored the likelihood that monetary policy will remain restrictive for a longer period and dousing expectations for near-term cuts in interest rates.

But not everything was down. United Airlines jumped 12.4%, taking off with other airline stocks following on its coattails: American Airlines climbed 5.6%, Delta Air Lines advanced 4.3% and Southwest Airlines rose 5.7%.

They all projected strong performances for the current quarter.

Stock news: Dow Jones down

Based on trading at 11:30 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average traded down 139.48 points, the S&P 500 was down 20.54 points and the Nasdaq Composite traded lower by 93.75 points.

The sectors in the negative included information technology and real estate.

Shares in Mobileye also rose on the daily following a note from the investment bank Needham highlighting the ‘overwhelming positive’ results from the automaker’s quarterly earnings and its new assisted-driving chips.

Stock news: More company performance

Shares in Eli Lilly also rose after the company’s new weight-loss drug for sleep apnea showed positive results, with participants on the drug losing three times more weight than the placebo group.

On the floor, advancers took leaps over decliners on the NYSE, while decliners edged out advancers on the Nasdaq. New highs and lows appeared across the indices.

Stock news: Adidas rises

European stocks bounced back on Wednesday as a strong run of results from luxury brand maker LVMH and German sportswear manufacturer Adidas buoyed consumer stocks which were also broadly up following the slump seen on Tuesday.

The European benchmark closed 0.2% higher, and its biggest sector gain came within personal and household goods, rising 1.8%.

Adidas stocks went up by 8.6% to their highest levels in more than two years, after the firm raised its 2024 guidance after posting stellar preliminary results for the first quarter.

LVMH shares were up 2.8%, a small comfort for those nervous about the future of luxury.

Other luxury companies, such as the French brand Hermes and the Geneva-based company Richemont, climbed 2.3 and 3.0%, respectively, while the luxury goods sector itself advanced 0.8%.

Stock news: Tech stocks drop

But tech sector stocks have also been in the spotlight, dropping 3.2% on the back of a 6.7% slide in ASML’s shares, after the tech hardware group reported weaker-than-expected new booking for the first quarter earlier this month.

Stock news: STOXX 600 surge

The sector has borne the brunt of investors’ earnings expectations this season, as the group has been a major pillar behind the STOXX 600’s surge this year, after excitement over artificial intelligence hit markets this year.

So far, the attention of the markets have been largely diverted by interest rates at an all-time high – not to mention the general condition of corporate Europe.

Meanwhile, March saw eurozone inflation slowing slightly, fuelling expectations for a cut in European Central Bank interest rates in June, despite rising energy costs and a sagging euro.

Stock news: ECB to cut rates?

On the policy side, the ECB board member Piero Cipollone said that June and July data ‘will lend weight to the case for urgently rates cuts’ and the Bundesbank President Joachim Nagel suggested that they might not.

Elsewhere among big stock movers, International Distributions Services jumped 28.9% to top the STOXX 600 after Czech billionaire Daniel Kretinsky announced he was tightening his grip on the bid for the company, which owns Britain’s Royal Mail.

Shares in Naturgy rose 6.1% after Abu Dhabi’s TAQA confirmed takeover talks.

Conversely, Continental shares fell 5.5% after it missed first-quarter revenue and profit margin targets.

Just Eat Takeaway was down 4.5% as it missed first-quarter order targets.

Adidas shares climbed more than 8% on Wednesday as the sportswear giant saw its stock jump to its highest level in more than two years after the company announced better-than-expected quarterly results and a growth forecast for 2024 boosted by strong demand for its sneakers.

Stock news: Adidas and Yeezy line

The wildly popular terrace retro styles of the company’s Samba, Gazelle and Campus models joined a strong performance in other fashion categories, Wedbush analysts said.

As Cedric Lecasble of the brokerage Stifel commented, that prompt and hefty 2024 guidance hike was more attributable to heavy-duty brands marketing by Adidas than actual sales from the Yeezy line.

The sportswear giant’s chief executive, Bjorn Gulden has begun to move forward with releases of the various Yeezy collections that the company had taken away from the controversial rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, with a plan to liquidate those inventory stocks while reinvigorating its classic retro styles.

Stock news: Adidas revenue

One comment reported by journalists from Telsey Advisory Group analysts said of Adidas’s revenue performance in the quarter: ‘Excluding Yeezy, which had less discounting and more full-price sales than last year, all regions posted solid growth in the first quarter.’

North America was also up.

Also, Wedbush expects Adidas to benefit from stronger channel inventory as more consumers choose the brand.

Some analysts think Adidas’s projected operating profit of 700 million euros by 2024 is conservative, specifically RBC’s Piral Dadhania who dissented over this figure, arguing that it is ‘more extreme than consensus and seems quite conservative for management expectations.’ By consensus, the 2024 estimate stands at €890 million.

In the latest quarter, they sold 150 million euros’ worth of Yeezy items, contributing just under 50 million to operating profit.

But management has indicated there will be no further operating profit from the rest of the company’s 200 million euro’s worth of Yeezy stock.

By 1107 GMT, Adidas shares had climbed 8.2%, outperforming the pan-European STOXX 600 index.

Stock news: Tesla Tweet chaos

Ever since an enigmatic Tweet on April 6, hours after a Reuters dispatch claimed Musk was scraping a $25,000 ‘Model 2’ electric car produced by his company Tesla, the auto company’s shareholders have been left wondering what’s going on.

Musk’s simple and terse response – ‘Reuters is lying’ – left it less than clear what ‘Reuters’ was lying about, and provided no other information of update, causing many angry shareholders to express concerns.

Even more than a fortnight later, silence from Musk is still leaving shareholders deeply agitated.

They want to know what is being done to fight a slowdown in electric vehicles globally and the increasingly tougher competition to increasingly inexpensive Chinese EVs.

And there was a tinge of panic to that announcement, coming so quickly after Tesla had killed more than 10% of its workforce and several top executives.

‘This is the kind of news that really upsets your shareholder base,’ analysts at Wedbush Securities noted.

The big worry, they added: ‘Can we get clear answers on the upcoming April 23 earnings call, specifically on giving some sort of a consistent strategic view on this business transitioning into the future – more specifically what the model 2 looks like and how they plan to execute.’

Stock news: Tesla under fire

This prima-facie evidence of brazen over-hype is made more complicated by the other half of Tesla’s April 5 report, which strongly implied that the affordable car project was being jettisoned in favour of developing a self-driving robotaxi based on the same platform.

When Musk later compounded his company’s grandiose claims about a new Tesla product and the timing of its launch by tweeting that Tesla would reveal a ‘Tesla Robotaxi’ coming this August 8, he prompted a new round of befuddlement.

Journalists, industry watchers and experts based their skepticism on the firm’s technical challenges and government regulatory hurdles that would have to be cleared before any truly road-worthy autobus could become available.

But while these moves prompted some investors to cheer on Musk’s apparent shift of attention to the development of robotaxis, others worried about the apparent death of the Model 2.

Deutsche Bank’s most recent statements on Tesla capture a recurring refrain in broader market commentary: ‘The [cancellation of Model 2] is IPUT [ie, or information put to use] for investors to think about changing Tesla’s valuation multiple.’

Against the backdrop of this uncertainty, Tesla’s financial fortunes and competitive position remain open to question, especially in light of the fact that vehicle sales for the first quarter dropped by 8.5%, representing the company’s first decrease in nearly four years.

This decline in sales comes hot on the heels of an influx of cheaper electric vehicles from Chinese manufacturers such as BYD that are giving Tesla a run for its money.

As well as new entrants into the sporty sedan market, such as Xiaomi, the smartphone giant, which impressed consumers everywhere after announcing plans to enter this rapidly emerging market sector with a low-budget sport sedan earlier this spring.

The market is eagerly watching to see what he’ll do next, hoping he finally gets some of that specificity that investors and analysts have been yearning for to make true Tesla’s promise of a better world while restoring the luster to its stock.

Meanwhile, shares of United Airlines leapt as much as 10% in morning trading on Wednesday, lifted by an upbeat second-quarter earnings prediction and solid first-quarter results.

This comes even as the company took a $200 million hit due to the grounding of aircraft due to Boeing’s safety concerns.

Analysts pointed out that United still delivered first-quarter results ahead of lowered expectations following the grounding in January of Boeing’s largest narrow-body jet, the 737 MAX-9. Boeing is a major client of United’s; when it announced quarterly results in March, it reduced its projection for aircraft deliveries to the airline this year by