Wall Street hit fresh record intraday highs on Tuesday, helped by a jump in Wal-Mart and energy stocks, but the gains were limited by declines in Amazon and technology stocks. Wal-Mart jumped more than 4 percent to a two-year high of $84.46 after forecasting US online sales would rise by about 40 percent in the next fiscal year and unveiling a $20 billion share buyback plan.
That helped the consumer staples index jump 0.76 percent, but gains were limited by P&G, which dropped 1.22 percent after activist investor Nelson Peltz unexpectedly failed in his bid to win a board seat. Investors are also focused on the third-quarter earnings season, which starts in earnest later this week, as they look to see if corporate profits justify the stocks' lofty valuations.
"There's a lot of fundamental underpinning to the rally," said Marcelle Daher, senior managing director of asset allocation at Manulife Asset Management. At 12:33 pm ET (1633 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 34.91 points, or 0.15 percent, at 22,795.98, and the S&P 500 was up 2.46 points, or 0.10 percent, at 2,547.19.
The Nasdaq Composite was down 9.34 points, or 0.14 percent, at 6,570.39, weighed down by a 0.83 percent drop in Amazon. The tech index, the best performing among the 11 major S&P sectors this year, was off 0.2 percent, weighed down by Alphabet, Facebook and Intel. Among the odd gainers in tech stocks was Nvidia, which rose 1.7 percent after unveiling chips for autonomous vehicles. American Airlines jumped 4.8 percent and United Continental soared 5.2 percent after the two airlines gave encouraging third-quarter forecasts. Delta, which is to report on Wednesday, was up 2.7 percent.