Stocks were mixed on Wednesday after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell said he wouldn’t take future consecutive rate hikes off the table “at all.”
These stocks made moves Wednesday:
Nvidia
(ticker: NVDA) declined 1.8% and
Advanced Micro Devices
(AMD) fell 0.2% after The Wall Street Journal reported the Commerce Department could stop the shipments of AI chips made by the semiconductor makers to customers in China unless the companies first obtain a license. The restrictions could be put in place as early as next month, the Journal reported, citing people familiar with the situation.
During an investor webinar Wednesday,
Nvidia
Chief Financial Officer Colette Kress said the company was aware the U.S. is considering further restrictions, but due to the level of strong demand for its products it doesn’t expect any “immediate material impact” to its results if the controls are adopted.
Micron Technology
(MU), which is scheduled to report quarterly earnings after the closing bell Wednesday, rose 0.4%. Other chip makers such as
Intel
(INTC) and
Qualcomm
(QCOM) traded lower.
Joby Aviation
(JOBY) soared 40% after the electric air taxi maker said it has received a special air-worthiness certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration for the first aircraft built at its pilot production line, which allows the company to start flight testing its first production prototype.
AST SpaceMobile
(ASTS) was falling 27% to $4.64 after announcing the launch of a sale of 12 million class A common shares.
Carnival
(CCL) rose 8.8% to $17.30 after Citi analysts boosted their price target on the cruise line company to $20 from $18. Other cruise companies were making gains, with
Royal Caribbean
(RCL) up 1.7% and
Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings
(NCLH) climbing 7.6%.
ZoomInfo
(ZI) gained 6.1% to $25.61 after shares of the corporate-information database company were initiated at Buy with a $35 price target by analysts at Needham.
Pinterest
(PINS) rose 6.6% to $28.13 after shares of the social media platform were raised to Overweight from Equal Weight at
Wells Fargo
and the price target was boosted to $34 from $23.
Snowflake
(SNOW) gained 3.9% after the cloud-based data warehousing company received a flurry of price target boosts from Wall Street firms. At its investor day on Wednesday, the company raised long-term operating margin and free cash flow margin guidance.
General Mills
(GIS) declined 5.2% after the food company reported a sharp decline in fiscal fourth-quarter profit and sales that missed analysts’ expectations.
Drone maker
AeroVironment
(AVAV) reported fiscal fourth-quarter revenue that beat analysts’ expectations and said it expects fiscal-year adjusted earnings of $2.30 to $2.60 a share on revenue of $630 million to $660 million, which also topped forecasts. The stock rose 4.9%.
The Food and Drug Administration rejected an application from
Regeneron Pharmaceuticals
(REGN) for approval of a new, higher-dose version of its blockbuster eye disease treatment Eylea. The stock fell 2.2% after declining 8.7% on Tuesday.
Regeneron said the FDA’s decision was “solely due to an ongoing review of inspection finding at a third-party filer” and Bloomberg reported that
Catalent
(CTLT) confirmed its Bloomington, Ind., site was the facility in question.
Catalent
shares tumbled 3.3%, and was one of the leading decliners in the
S&P 500.
Corrections & amplifications: Regeneron Pharmaceuticals has a production facility in Bloomington, Ind. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said it was in Bloomberg,Ind.
Write to Joe Woelfel at joseph.woelfel@barrons.com
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