After a Day of Sharp Swings, Wall Street Ends Nearly where It Began

A day of dramatic swings on Wall Street, including Microsoft’s worst drop in years and a sudden reversal for the price of gold, finished with only relatively modest moves on Thursday.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.1 percent after flirting with its record high in the morning and dropping by as much as 1.5 percent later in the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 55 points, or 0.1 percent, after erasing an earlier loss of more than 400 points, and the Nasdaq composite fell 0.7  percent.

Microsoft was the heaviest weight on the market by far, and the tech giant tumbled 10 percent even though it reported stronger profit and revenue for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Investors honed in instead on how much Microsoft is spending on investments, whether growth in its Azure cloud business will slow and how long its push into artificial-intelligence technology will take to turn into big profits.

Please select this link to read the complete article from The Associated Press.