Stocks Split in Early Trading Tuesday as Apple Weighed on the Dow and Chip Stocks Bounced

Stocks pulled in different directions early Tuesday, and much of the attention landed on a single name. In the first part of regular trading the Dow Jones Industrial Average was lower while the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite held small gains. The session is taking place on the day U.S. midterm voting is underway, with one of the week's most watched earnings reports still due after the close.

According to the Associated Press, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern the S&P 500 was up about 0.2 percent even though more stocks fell than rose within the index, the Dow was down about 232 points, or 0.4 percent, and the Nasdaq Composite was about 0.5 percent higher. These are early figures that will keep moving through the session, so the levels here describe a single morning snapshot rather than where the market will finish.

Why Apple is a big part of the split

The gap between a falling Dow and a rising Nasdaq owes a lot to how each index is built, though it is not the whole story. The Dow is price weighted, so a company with a high share price carries outsized influence, and Apple's roughly 3.4 percent decline contributed to the Dow's loss, with its high share price giving the move extra sway on the average. The weighting alone does not explain the entire divergence, because the S&P 500 managed a small gain even with more of its members falling than rising. The strength was concentrated in a handful of large stocks rather than broad. Nvidia, up about 3 percent as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern, was the single biggest positive force on the S&P 500, according to the Associated Press.

Apple's slide followed guidance that pointed to pressure on its profit margin in the holiday quarter. The company beat on profit and revenue for the latest quarter but signaled gross margin could narrow to about 45 to 46 percent, which investors read as a warning. We covered the cause in depth in today's Big Story on Apple's memory cost warning: the same artificial intelligence buildout lifting chip stocks is draining the supply of ordinary memory, and the higher cost of that memory is now landing on hardware makers' income statements.

That connection is the knot at the center of Tuesday's tape. The memory squeeze is a tailwind for the companies that sell chips and a headwind for the companies that have to buy them. Apple sits on the buyer side of that trade.

The chipmakers bounced

On the other side of the ledger, the semiconductor group rebounded after a rough stretch. Nvidia was up about 3 percent as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern, the single biggest positive force on the S&P 500 per the Associated Press, and other chip names traded higher alongside it in the first part of the session. The bounce matters because the chip complex had been at the heart of a weeks long selloff that pushed the Nasdaq 100 into correction territory; the index closed Monday, November 2, about 10.4 percent below its October 6 record high, meeting the usual threshold for a correction.

A one day move does not end a correction, and it is worth keeping it in proportion. By Tuesday morning the index had recovered part of that ground, trading closer to its recent high than Monday's close, so the correction label describes where things stood at Monday's finish rather than Tuesday's early tape. We wrote last week about how a large AI rout masked a quiet rally in the rest of the market, and Tuesday fits that same pattern: the headline indexes are being pushed and pulled by a few giant names. The fact that the S&P 500 rose while more of its stocks fell is a reminder that an index level and the typical stock can tell different stories on the same day.

Earnings reactions tell a consistent story

Several reports this week reinforced a pattern that has defined the season: beating estimates is no longer enough, because investors are trading on guidance and forward metrics more than the quarter just reported.

Shopify dropped sharply, down about 15 percent in premarket trading, even though its top line grew quickly. Quarterly revenue of about 3.74 billion dollars rose roughly 32 percent from a year earlier but landed just shy of consensus, and gross merchandise volume of about 119.2 billion dollars came in a touch below the roughly 120.1 billion dollars Wall Street expected, according to the company's results. A narrow shortfall against a premium valuation was enough to trigger the selling.

Palantir slid about 4 percent even though it beat estimates with revenue of roughly 2.31 billion dollars, up about 96 percent from a year earlier, and even though it raised its full year guidance across the board. The company said it earned more from U.S. commercial customers than from the U.S. government for the first time. The pullback reflected how the market read those results, with attention on the stock's rich valuation and on commentary that some new contracts were shorter in duration than usual, rather than any slowdown warning from the company itself. On the brighter side, Backblaze surged more than 30 percent in premarket trading after a double beat and a raised full year outlook for its cloud storage business, a reminder that the selling is far from uniform.

Oil eased and the election sat in the background

Energy prices gave the broad market a little help. According to the Associated Press, Brent crude was down about 0.9 percent near 103.80 dollars a barrel as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern, though it had swung between roughly 101 and 107 dollars during the morning amid conflicting headlines about the United States and Iran. Lower oil tends to ease input costs across much of the economy, which can support corners of the market that have nothing to do with the AI trade.

The midterm elections are the day's other backdrop. Market history is a poor predictor of any single session, and election outcomes rarely move diversified portfolios in a durable way. If the political calendar has you tempted to make changes, our explainer on what market history actually says about elections lays out why long horizon investors have generally been rewarded for staying the course rather than trading the headlines.

What still lands today

The session's biggest scheduled catalyst is still ahead. AMD reports fiscal third quarter results after the close, with a management call set for 5:00 p.m. Eastern. Previews pointed to Wall Street looking for revenue near 13.09 billion dollars, up roughly 42 percent from a year earlier, with adjusted earnings per share around 1.95 dollars. As Intel's reaction showed last week, the number that moves the stock after hours is likely to be the forward guidance, not the quarter that just closed. Rising component costs, including the same memory squeeze weighing on Apple, are part of what investors will be listening for.

For a household investor, the practical read on a split tape is simple. The indexes are telling two stories at once, and neither one is a signal to overhaul a plan built for years rather than hours. The chip bounce could fade by the close, just as Monday's early rally did when we covered Monday's session giving back its gains. What matters more than any early print is whether your mix of stocks, bonds, and cash still matches the amount of risk your finances can actually carry. The slider below is a hypothetical illustration of how steady contributions can compound over time, not a forecast of where any index will finish today.

All of the levels above are from early trading and will keep moving through the session and into the after hours tape once AMD reports. The figures here describe where the market stood in the first part of the trading day on Tuesday, November 3, 2026, and should not be read as closing numbers.