Stock Market Today: Live Updates

European stock markets opened lower on Wednesday, with the Stoxx 600 index down 0.2% as of 8:22 a.m. London time.

France’s CAC 40 index fell 0.35%, Germany’s DAX lost 0.2% and Britain’s FTSE 100 was just below flat.

Samsung Electronics’ labor union has announced that it will go on strike on June 7, marking the first time in the company’s history that workers have chosen to stop working.

The Samsung Electronics National Union, known in South Korea as Zensamro, represents around 28,000 workers, more than a fifth of the electronics giant’s workforce.

The strike comes amid a deadlock in wage negotiations between the union and South Korea’s major IT companies that have been ongoing since January.

Samsung shares fell 1.16% on Wednesday.

Lim Hui Jie

Australian consumer prices rose 3.6% year-on-year in April, better than expected, official data showed.

The April weighted consumer price index beat the 3.4% increase forecast in a Reuters poll and also beat the 3.5% increase in the CPI for March.

“Inflation has remained relatively stable over the past five months, but the annual rate of inflation has increased slightly for two consecutive months,” Michelle Marquardt, head of price statistics at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, said in a statement.

The data showed the biggest factors driving increases in April were the prices of housing, food, non-alcoholic beverages, alcohol, tobacco and transport.

Shreyasi Sanyal

Investors are concerned about the health of the rally after major indexes hit new record highs without widespread participation, but one expert says tight trading ranges don’t necessarily mean markets are weak.

“When you look at the market, I think the market still looks healthy because the big names still look very healthy,” said JC O’Hara, chief technical strategist at Ross MKM, who pointed to Nvidia’s 6% gain on Tuesday as an example.

“If that has a significant impact on the index, then I think the index is fine, but for stock pickers, it just narrows the pool of potential candidates that could be great buying opportunities,” he said.

CNBC Pro subscribers can read the full story here.

Sarah Min

The problem is that the market is “priced on perfection.”

That’s the view expressed by Morgan Stanley Wealth Management in a 15-page report released Tuesday by chief investment officer Lisa Charette.

Even if inflation and interest rates fall, the floor would be “well above recent cyclical lows, yet this scenario is barely reflected in current market prices,” according to the report. “With above-average uncertainty, market pricing assuming perfection, historically high valuations, and apparent investor complacency, we are focused on risk-adjusted returns and have little interest in taking duration in stocks or bonds at this time,” Morgan Stanley’s wealth services unit wrote.

Stocks have risen to all-time highs, largely due to rising price-to-earnings ratios that investors are willing to pay, “despite increasing uncertainty about economic trends, potential policy responses, and the upcoming presidential election.”

The market is expensive, Charette writes. “Forward price-to-earnings multiples are in the 90th percentile over the past 100 years.” The S&P 500’s forward price-to-earnings multiple of 21 is “one of the highest forward multiples in the past 35 years and matches its 2021 high.” [and] “It’s approaching the all-time highs seen during the dot-com bubble,” she wrote.

Scott Schnipper

Want to know just how big Nvidia has gotten? Let me put it this way: The chipmaker’s $2.802 trillion market cap is more than $1 trillion larger than the market cap of the entire energy sector of the S&P 500. If you add up the market caps of each stock in the sector, it’s worth about $1.767 trillion.

Nvidia surged 6.98% on Tuesday, setting a new record and building on a surge from last week. The company’s shares are up 130% this year, including more than 31% this month alone.

Stock futures were mixed on Tuesday evening.

Futures for the 30-stock Dow fell 34 points, or about 0.1%, while S&P 500 futures were down 0.03% and Nasdaq 100 futures were up 0.03%.

Pia Singh