Stock market today: Live updates

Deutsche Bank trimmed its price target on shares of McDonald’s to $290 from $295 following a disappointing second-quarter print.

“We believe this quarter could be a clearing event to improve sentiment as numbers have now been reset lower, it appears MCD has a more defined action plan to drive improvement,” wrote analyst Lauren Silberman.

The price change comes a day after the fast-food giant missed quarterly earnings and revenue estimates and reported a decline in same-store sales as consumers ease spending.

The new price target implies about 11% upside from Monday’s close. The analyst retained her buy rating on the stock, reiterating the firm’s conviction in McDonald’s ‘global strength and value leadership. Shares have slumped roughly 11% this year.

The firm sees “limited downside risk to numbers from here and given current valuation, believe MCD offers a favorable risk/reward profile,” she added.

— Samantha Subin

CrowdStrike’s 11% slide on Tuesday brought the cybersecurity stock’s month-to-date losses to a whopping 40%. That would mark its biggest one-month loss on record.

The stock’s most-recent decline comes after CNBC reported that Delta Air Lines hired attorney David Boies to seek damages from CrowdStrike following the historic IT outage that affected numerous industries, including airlines.

Goldman Sachs is staying bullish on Dollar General as spending trends of lower-income consumers increasingly come into focus.

Analysts led by Kate McShane reiterated their buy rating on the discount retailer in a note on Monday. Goldman argues that consumer sentiment toward the company and cash flow trends inside Dollar General are improving.

Shares rose nearly 2% Tuesday afternoon.

For more on Goldman’s call, click here.

— Hakyung Kim

Two leading Wall Street CEOs told CNBC on Tuesday that they expect the Federal Reserve to start cutting interest rates soon.

“If they don’t cut tomorrow … then they’ll cut in September,” Starwood Capital Group Chair Barry Sternlicht said from the Paris Olympics. Sternlicht faulted the Fed for using outdated rent inflation data as justification for not reducing rates sooner.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon also said he expects monetary policy easing to happen soon.

“One or two cuts in the fall seems more likely. I guess there will be some messaging around that,” said Solomon, who also was interviewed on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” from the Olympics. “The direction of travel is relatively clear.”

— Jeff Cox

Here are the stocks on the move midday:

• JetBlue — The airline soared almost 20% after reporting second-quarter earnings that beat analysts’ expectations. The New York City-based carrier posted adjusted earnings of 8 cents per share, excluding one-time items, compared to analysts’ estimated loss of 11 cents per share, according to LSEG. Revenue came in at $2.43 billion, also above the analyst estimate of $2.4 billion.
• Sprouts Farmers Market — Shares surged about 15%, hitting a new 52-week high, after the food retailer’s latest earnings of 94 cents per share on revenue of $1.89 billion topped analysts’ consensus estimates of 78 cents in earnings per share on $1.84 billion in revenue, according to LSEG. The Phoenix-based grocery chain also raised its full-year earnings guidance, forecasting revenue rising between 9% and 10%, compared to analysts’ 8.2% consensus growth estimate.
• Varonis Systems — The data security stock rallied 13% after posting better-than-expected second-quarter results. Varonis reported adjusted earnings of 5 cents per share, better than an expected loss of 2 cents per share, according to analysts polled by FactSet. Revenue also came in above expectations at $130.3 million compared to a $124.8 million consensus estimate. Varonis also issued stronger-than-expected guidance for the current quarter.

Read the full list here.

— Sean Conlon

Shares of Howmet Aerospace popped more than 12% after the aircraft components maker reported earnings that beat analysts’ expectations.

That gain made Howmet the best-performing S&P 500 stock in early trading. It also put it on pace for its biggest one-day gain since May 2, when it jumped 15.5%.

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index rose to 100.3 this month from 97.8 in June, even as consumers felt less optimistic about current business and labor market conditions.

“Even though consumers remain relatively positive about the labor market, they still appear to be concerned about elevated prices and interest rates, and uncertainty about the future; things that may not improve until next year,” Conference Board chief economist Dana Peterson wrote.

“Expectations for future income improved slightly, but consumers remained generally negative about business and employment conditions ahead,” Peterson added.

— Fred Imbert

Job openings edged lower in June while the hiring rate hit its highest level, excluding Covid-impacted data, in nearly 11 years.

Available jobs totaled 8.18 million for the month, a decrease from the upwardly revised 8.23 million in May, according to the Labor Department’s Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey released Tuesday. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones had been looking for 8.1 million. The ratio of openings to unemployed workers held around 1.2 to 1.

While the openings number was little changed, the hiring level tumbled by 314,000, taking the rate as a share of the workforce down to 3.4%. The last time it was lower, excluding April 2020 and the mass Covid-related layoffs, was October 2013.

— Jeff Cox

The Grayscale Bitcoin ETF (GBTC) dropped more than 10% Tuesday morning, but the move is a mechanical change that should not hurt the fund’s shareholders.

On Friday, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission approved a rule change for an exchange to list a “mini” version of the Grayscale Bitcoin ETF, which will have a lower management fee. The new fund would effectively be a spinoff of 10% of the bitcoin held by the old fund.

The fund is expected to begin trading this week under the ticker BTC.

Shareholders in the old fund should be given a stake in the new fund as well when it launches on a one-to-one basis, meaning that the exposure to the underlying bitcoin will remain the same.

— Jesse Pound, Tanaya Macheel

Procter & Gamble is seeing top-line pressure, posting its third consecutive revenue miss for the first time since 2016. Organic sales growth also modestly missed Wall Street expectations, rising 2% versus an estimate of 3.2%.

A big problem is developing for P&G: Price hikes are slowing and demand has also been tepid. Prices rose 1% in the latest quarter, the smallest year-over-year gain since October 2021. Meanwhile, volume also rose 1% and that is after a couple of quarters of flat growth, too.

Volume growth has been hurt by very poor demand out of China. Executives told analysts on the earnings call that they have seen “a weaker key consumption period in China and overall market sentiment in China has not improved.” They also “expect the China recovery to be slow and to take time.”

P&G said China organic sales tumbled 8% from a year ago. Contrast that to North America, where the company grew market share amid solid 4% volume growth as prices eased.

— Robert Hum

Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is looking to raise $2 billion in the initial public offering of his new closed-end fund, called Pershing Square USA.

The firm announced Tuesday that it plans to sell 40 million shares at $50 apiece. Pershing Square USA will also give its underwriters the option to purchase up to six million additional shares.

At one point, Pershing Square was looking to raise as much as $25 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.

— Jesse Pound

Check out some of the companies making headlines in premarket trading:

• CrowdStrike — Shares slipped 5% after CNBC reported Delta Air Lines has retained legal counsel to pursue damages from both CrowdStrike and Microsoft after a software update led to mass flight interruptions in July.
• Woodward — The aerospace and industrial equipment company slipped more than 11% after fiscal third-quarter revenue missed Wall Street estimates. Woodward posted revenue of $847.7 million in the quarter while analysts polled by FactSet forecast $853.3 million.
• F5 Inc. — Shares surged nearly 14% after the software company reported a top- and bottom-line beat in the fiscal third quarter. F5 posted adjusted earnings of $3.36 per share, compared to an LSEG estimate of $2.97 per share. Revenue of $695 million was also higher than the $686 million expected.

Read the full list here.

— Brian Evans

Pfizer shares added 1.6% in premarket trading after the drugmaker exceeded second-quarter revenue and adjusted earnings and raised its full-year outlook. The company benefited from its cost-cutting program, better-than-expected sales of its Covid antiviral pill Paxlovid and strong product sales across its non-Covid businesses.

For the quarterly period, Pfizer reported adjusted earnings per share of 60 cents, while analysts polled by LSEG expected 46 cents per share. Revenue came out at $13.28 billion, exceeding estimates of $12.96 billion.

For more on Pfizer’s earnings and guidance, read here.

— Pia Singh, Annika Kim Constantino

Shares of Merck were down more than 1% in the premarket after the pharma giant issued weaker-than-expected earnings guidance for the full year. The company sees its full-year bottom line in a range of $7.94 per share to $8.04 per share. That missed a FactSet estimate of $8.16 per share and was below a previous company forecast.

European stock markets were slightly higher Tuesday morning as corporate earnings continued to roll in.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 index was up 0.08% at 9:15 a.m. in London, with most sectors in the green.

While most major bourses gained, London’s FTSE 100 fell 0.68% as drinks giant Diageo plunged more than 10% after posting a sales decline.

— Jenni Reid

Delta Air Lines has hired attorney David Boies to seek damages against CrowdStrike and Microsoft after an outage earlier this month resulted in thousands of flight cancellations, CNBC reported.

News of the development, reported by CNBC’s Phil LeBeau, sent shares of CrowdStrike tumbling 5%. Microsoft shares inched lower by less than 1%.

The outage — which occurred on July 19 after a software update from CrowdStrike led to a massive disruption of Microsoft systems — cost Delta an estimated $350 million to $500 million.

Shares of CrowdStrike are off more than 32% in July.

Read more details from CNBC’s Jordan Novet and Ari Levy here.

— Darla Mercado

Homebuilding stocks “should become more squeezable as increased consumer housing demand drives long buying momentum and stock prices,” according to a recent note from S3 Partners’ managing director of predictive analytics Ihor Dusaniwsky.

That trend has probably already begun, with S3 observing “a trickle of short covering over the last seven days with $40 million of Homebuilding shares bought-to-cover.”

“We should see a reversal of the short selling activity we have seen over the last 30 days due to the large mark-to-market losses short sellers have incurred,” Dusaniwsky wrote. Short positions in homebuilding stocks have lost $959 million on a year-to-date, mark-to-market basis, or almost 18%, S3 said. More than 60% “of every Homebuilding shorted stock was an unprofitable trade in 2024,” said the researcher who specializes in tracking short sales. 

The $2 billion SPDR S&P Homebuilders ETF is higher by more than 16% so far in July and nearly 23% in 2024. The S&P 500 is little changed in July and ahead 14.5% in 2024.

The tech sector may soon find some support, according to UBS.

Mark Haefele, investment chief at UBS Global Wealth Management, anticipates that the recent market volatility could continue as investors continue to dump tech stocks for other interest rate-sensitive assets. The Nasdaq Composite is the lone major index headed for a losing month.

However, he added the recent pullback could soon result in an attractive entry point for the sector. Over the past decade in markets history, there has been at least one 10% correction in global tech every year, and a bounce back in the six months afterward. The one notable exception is during the 2017 bull market.

“We think the tech sector should find support in the coming weeks and resume its leadership,” Haefele wrote. “In fact, the recent pullback creates a reentry opportunity, in our view, especially for those companies with strong earnings growth visibility.”

— Sarah Min