Check out the companies making headlines before the bell. Abercrombie & Fitch — Shares slipped nearly 4% despite the apparel retailer’s earnings beat and strong holiday guidance . Abercrombie & Fitch reported third-quarter earnings of $2.50 per share, topping the $2.39 per share LSEG consensus estimate. Revenue was $1.21 billion, versus the $1.19 billion expected. The company also raised its full-year guidance. Best Buy — Shares slid 7.4% after Best Buy posted third-quarter results that missed analyst expectations and cut its full-year sales forecast. Adjusted earnings of $1.26 per share came in below the $1.29 per-share earnings expected by analysts polled by LSEG. Revenue of $9.45 billion missed the $9.63 billion consensus estimate. Kohl’s — Shares plummeted nearly 17% following the retailer’s weaker-than-expected third-quarter earnings. Kohl’s earned 20 cents per share on revenue of $3.51 billion for the period, while analysts surveyed by LSEG had penciled in 28 cents per share on $3.64 billion in revenue. Stellantis — Shares of European and Japanese automakers slid after President-elect Donald Trump said in a Truth Social post on Monday that he plans to raise tariffs on products from China, Mexico and Canada. Many carmakers have factories in Mexico. Stellantis, which is considering revising its plan to expand manufacturing into Mexico, saw shares dip more than 3.5% on the news. Automakers General Motors and Ford Motor also edged more than 4% and 2%, respectively. Dick’s Sporting Goods — Shares of the sporting goods retailer jumped 6.6% after the company’ s quarterly results beat expectations and indicated a strong holiday shopping season outlook. Dick’s raised its full-year guidance and said it now expects fiscal 2024 same-store sales to grow between 3.6% and 4.2%, up from a previous range of 2.5% to 3.5%. Zoom Video Communications — Shares slipped roughly 10.5% after the video software maker gave fiscal fourth-quarter adjusted earnings per share guidance that was roughly in line with estimates. Zoom exceeded Wall Street’s profit and revenue estimates for its fiscal third quarter, however. Amgen — Shares fell more than 3% after the company said its experimental weight loss drug helped patients lose up to 20% of their weight after a year. However, those trial results appeared to be on the low end of investor expectations. Rivian Automotive — Shares of the electric vehicle maker rose about 9% after the company said on received conditional approval for a government loan of up to $6.6 billion to support its production capacity, including the construction of its Georgia EV plant. Fluence Energy — The energy storage stock fell about 4% after the company’s fourth-quarter revenue missed expectations. Fluence reported $1.23 billion in revenue for the quarter, below the $1.28 billion expected by analysts, according to FactSet. Earnings per share of 34 cents was ahead of the 28 cents expected by analysts. Novo Nordisk , Eli Lilly — Shares of drugmakers Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly rose more than 2.5% and 4.7%, respectively, after the Biden administration proposed a new rule that Medicare and Medicaid would cover costly weight-loss drugs for Americans with obesity . Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and Eli Lilly’s Zepbound weekly injectables treat obesity. — CNBC’s Sarah Min, Sean Conlon, Fred Imbert, Jesse Pound, Michelle Fox Theobald contributed reporting.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.
“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.
Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.
The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.
However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.
S&P 500, YTD
Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.
“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”
A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022.
Callaghan O’hare | Reuters
Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.
The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.
Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors.
The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.
Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.
The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.
Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading. Tesla – Shares jumped more than 5%. Politico , citing three Trump insiders, reported President Donald Trump told members of his inner circle that Tesla CEO Elon Musk could leave his current role in the coming weeks. Amazon – Shares of the e-commerce and cloud giant popped more than 2%. The New York Times , citing three people familiar, reported that Amazon has put in a bid to acquire TikTok. The video app is staring down an April 5 deadline to part with its Chinese owner or face a ban in the U.S. Rivian Automotive – Shares of the electric vehicle maker slid more than 5%. Rivian said that it delivered 8,640 vehicles for the first quarter , marking a 36% drop in deliveries compared to a year ago. However, that figure exceeded the consensus estimate of 8,200, per Visible Alpha. nCino – The cloud banking firm’s stock pulled back more than 20% after nCino reported weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings and soft guidance for the first quarter and full year. For the fourth quarter, nCino posted adjusted earnings of 12 cents per share, below the 19 cents per share that analysts polled by FactSet were expecting. The stock tumbled more than 30% in the premarket, which KBW said was ” overdone .” BlackBerry – The software and communications stock tumbled 6%. BlackBerry guided for fiscal first-quarter revenue of between $107 million to $115 million, lower than the $124.6 million analysts had expected, per FactSet. However, both BlackBerry’s fourth-quarter adjusted earnings and revenue exceeded consensus estimates. Newsmax – The stock sank more than 45%, giving up some of the big gains it reaped following its debut on the New York Stock Exchange Monday. The conservative cable news network surged 179% in the previous session and 700% on its first official trading day. Trump Media & Technology Group – Shares dropped 5% after Trump Media in a securities filing disclosed the possibility of a significant stock sale , including by insider shareholders such as the president’s trust. Petco – Shares of the pet goods retailer soared about 15% after CEO Joel Anderson purchased almost 1.6 million shares, according to a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. CoreWeave – The stock rose more than 8%, extending its recent gains. On Tuesday, shares of the Nvidia-backed cloud computing company climbed nearly 42% . The recent advances follow a rocky debut for CoreWeave late last week. Nvidia – The chipmaker added roughly 1% ahead of the April 2 tariff announcement. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently downplayed any negative impact from U.S. tariffs. The company’s chips are mostly made in Taiwan, but some of its systems are manufactured in other countries, such as Mexico and the U.S. Scotts Miracle-Gro – The lawn care stock jumped nearly 5% on the heels of Truist’s upgrade to buy from hold . Truist said the stock can benefit as economic uncertainty pushes consumers to shift spending from travel to the home. — CNBC’s Sarah Min, Alex Harring, Lisa Kailai Han and Michelle Fox contributed reporting.