Stock market today: Calm returns to Wall Street, and US indexes make only modest

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 42 points, or 0.1%, and the Nasdaq composite was 0.3% higher.

Trump on Monday agreed to delay his taxes on U.S. imports of Canadian and Mexican products for a month, with the announcement on Canada coming after trading closed for the day. That raised Wall Street’s longstanding hopes that Trump’s tough talk on tariffs is just that, talk. The hope is that Trump sees tariffs as a stick he can use in negotiations with trading partners rather than as a long-term policy.

That hope is built in part on traders’ belief that Trump would be turned off by the damage Wall Street would take if a worst-case, long-term trade war were to occur. Trump has pointed in the past to the stock market as a real-time measure of his approval.

But a trade war is still possible, and some analysts say more swings may be ahead because Trump’s threats should be taken both seriously and literally.

“Investors have suggested the equity market is the US administration’s scorecard and any policy changes that hurt risk assets will be quickly dialed back,” Bank of America strategists led by Mark Cabana wrote in a BofA Global Research report. “We advise caution.”

They say a big takeaway from all the tariff tumult is that the Trump administration is transactional, and “nothing is settled until it is final.”

Trump is pressing ahead with a 10% tax on U.S. companies importing things from China, for example. And China retaliated on Tuesday with its own tariffs on select American imports and an antitrust investigation into Google. The measures were announced just minutes after Trump’s tariffs on Chinese products effect.

The stock price of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, rose 0.9% in early trading.

Elsewhere on Wall Street, stocks that had swung sharply a day before when worries were high about tariffs on Mexico and Canada were calmer.

Auto makers had dropped because so much of their production occurs in Mexico, for example. But General Motors edged down by just 0.1%, and Ford Motor rose 1.5%.

More attention was on earnings reports for U.S. companies, which would likely be in the market’s spotlight if not for worries about a potential trade war.

Palantir Technologies jumped 24.8% after reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. The Denver company also issued strong guidance for the coming year, well ahead of analysts’ projections. In a letter to shareholders, CEO Alexander Karp said Palantir’s revenue from government contracts grew 45% year-over-year in the fourth quarter and called the company he co-founded a “software juggernaut.”

PepsiCo fell 2.5% after it said North American demand for its snacks and drinks remained weak, leading to a second straight quarterly decline in sales. The company has raised prices repeatedly and did so again the most recent quarter, sending some customers in search of cheaper snack brands.

Shares of pharmaceutical giant Merck tumbled 11.7% after it beat sales and profit forecasts but issued a tepid outlook.

In the bond market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury edged up to 4.57% from 4.56% late Monday.

In stock markets abroad, London’s FTSE 100 sank 0.3%, but other big European markets rose modestly.

In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng jumped 2.8%, and South Korea’s Kospi rose 1.1%.

AP Writers Matt Ott and Zen Soo contributed.