US stocks fell on Thursday for the third session in a row as Wall Street weighed an unexpected drop in jobless claims and a sharp upgrade in GDP growth, developments that complicate the outlook for rate cuts amid uncertainty about Federal Reserve policy.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) dropped 0.4%, and the S&P 500 (^GSPC) lost roughly 0.5%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) also around 0.5%. Big Tech stocks took hits, with Oracle (ORCL) adding to recent losses and Tesla (TSLA) off over 4%.

Markets are putting the brakes on stocks' recent record-breaking rally amid debate over whether AI fervor is stretching valuations too much.

At the same time, the uplift from the Federal Reserve's switch to lowering rates is fading, as signs of division among policymakers dent hopes for another two cuts this year.

In a positive sign for the labor market, jobless claims data released Thursday showed that the number of Americans filing for unemployment dropped to 218,000 for the week ending Sept. 20 from 232,000 previously. Continuing claims also fell slightly to 1.92 million.

Meanwhile, US second quarter GDP rose to an annualized pace of 3.8%, rebounding from a 0.6% decline in Q1 and well above estimates for a 3.3% rate of growth.

That sets the stage for Friday's release of the Personal Consumption Expenditures index, the Fed's preferred gauge of inflation. The PCE print for August is expected to show an easing in price pressures, which could make a case for a shift in rate policy.

In corporates, Costco (COST) is expected to report its quarterly results after the bell on Thursday. Investors expect to see a jump in sales as shoppers pursue deals amid economic uncertainty.

Intel (INTC) stock was up 10% on Thursday afternoon as investors cheered the chipmaker's attempt to seek investments from iPhone maker Apple (AAPL) in order to work closer together, though Wall Street is wary of such a collaboration.

Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said it's unlikely a tie-up (beyond an investment) would materialize anytime soon.

Rasgon said it's \\"unlikely\\" Apple would collaborate with Intel to co-design a chip for its computers or shift to producing its in-house chips in Intel's factories rather than TSMC's, writing \\"a foundry agreement with Intel seems very premature.\\"

Intel passed on an offer to make chips for Apple's first iPhones in the early 2000s.

Apple moved ahead with its own Arm-based (ARM) chips for personal computers that are manufactured by Intel's contract manufacturing rival, Taiwan-based TSMC (TSM).

Yahoo Finance's David Hollerith reports:

Goldman Sachs (GS) CEO David Solomon said he hasn't landed on a firm view about whether US public companies, including his own, should shift to reporting earnings half as often as the current standard.

\\"I'm not ready to give ... public advocacy on one side or the other,” Solomon said during a wide-ranging discussion at a Thursday event hosted by Georgetown University's Psaros Center for Financial Markets and Policy. \\"It's not a crystal-clear issue and, you know, until a week ago, I didn't know it was something I needed to think about right now,\\" he added

Read more here.

Few corners of the market were in green territory on Thursday as stocks headed toward their third consecutive fall this week.

Among the outliers, gold (GC=F) rose slightly to hover above $3,770 per ounce. Silver (SI=F) also gained 2% to jump above $45 per ounce.

Gold is up more than 40% year to date, while silver is up 55% during the same period.

Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferré reports:

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) slipped below $110,000 on Thursday amid a broader sell-off in crypto and stocks.

The largest cryptocurrency declined more than 3% while ethereum (ETH-USD), solana (SOL-USD), and other coins saw even bigger drawdowns in what has been a rocky week for the crypto market.

Ether fell roughly 5% to below $3,900 before paring losses, marking its lowest level since August, as ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) saw net outflows over the past 24 hours.

Read more here.

Tesla stock (TSLA) fell 3% after the company's EV sales declined in Europe for the eighth straight month.

Yahoo Finance's Pras Subramanian reports that, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers' Association (ACEA), Tesla EV registrations (a proxy for sales) in Europe fell to just 14,831 units in August, a 22.5% drop compared to a year ago. Meanwhile, total EV registrations in the region rose 26.8% in August.

Sales fell sharply in Sweden and Denmark, whereas Norway offered a lone bright spot, with sales up nearly 22%.

Tesla's pains in Europe have grown as stiff competition from Chinese EV makers and the unpopularity of CEO Elon Musk have hurt the brand. A new survey from research firm Escalent found that car buyers in Europe were more likely to consider purchasing a vehicle from China than from the US, with the US's tariffs and trade policies playing a role.

Despite a rough 2025, shares remain positive year to date, though Tesla's 6% gain since the beginning of the year trails the S&P 500's 12% return so far.

Read more here.

Costco (COST) is set to report its fourth quarter earnings results after market close on Thursday as it navigates a choppy consumer landscape, tariff-related pressure, and competition from peers like Walmart's (WMT) Sam's Club.

Yahoo Finance's Brooke DiPalma reports:

For the quarter, revenue at the wholesale giant is expected to clock in at $86.03 billion, with adjusted earnings per share forecast to come in at $5.82, per Bloomberg consensus estimates.

Same-store sales are expected to grow 6.2%, with US same-store sales set to rise 6.1% and sales in Canada expected to increase 6.8%. ...

Oppenheimer analyst Rupesh Parikh views Costco's long-term prospects \\"very favorably\\" as the company leans into its value proposition, global growth, and consistent track record of returns for shareholders. ...

Still, the analyst notes that during the most recent quarter, Amazon rolled out its same-day delivery initiative, and since then, Costco's stock — alongside BJ's (BJ), Dollar General (DG), Dollar Tree (DLTR), and Kroger (KR) — has underperformed.

Read more here.

Lithium Americas (LAC) surged another 20% in trading on Thursday, one day after the stock nearly doubled in value.

The gains come as the Trump administration is apparently seeking a stake for the US in the operator of what is set to be the largest lithium mine in the country.

As Yahoo Finance's Jake Conley detailed yesterday:

Under the terms of the prospective Lithium Americas deal, the mining company has offered the administration no-cost warrants on up to 10% of the company's common shares. The administration is also reported to be seeking purchase guarantees from General Motors (GM), which has $625 million in the project.

The original loan includes terms that allow the administration to seize control of the project if it is delayed or faces major cost overruns, according to Reuters.

The proposed mining project in Nevada would be the largest lithium mining project in the Western Hemisphere, producing more than 40,000 metric tons of lithium carbonate in its first phase, set to begin in 2028 — enough of the metal byproduct to construct 800,000 electric vehicles, according to Reuters.

Yahoo Finance's Jennifer Schonberger reports:

The rate debate inside the Federal Reserve is intensifying as policy makers go public with their views about the path ahead for monetary policy.

On Thursday, Chicago Fed president Austan Goolsbee and Kansas City Fed president Jeff Schmid both expressed discomfort with aggressively cutting rates further due to concerns about inflation.

At the same time, new Fed governor Stephen Miran continued with his public campaign to push more rapid cuts. He argued in a Bloomberg interview that the current level of 4% to 4.25% is highly restrictive and poses a risk to the US economy.

“That’s why it’s so important to start adjusting more quickly, rather than less quickly,” Miran said Thursday in an interview on Fox Business.

Read the full story here.

Yahoo Finance's Jake Conley reports:

Cloud computing provider CoreWeave (CRWV) rebounded from an initial drop in morning trading on Thursday after announcing a fresh $6.5 billion deal with OpenAI (OPAI.PVT), adding to an already multibillion-dollar set of agreements with the ChatGPT maker.

CoreWeave lost 5% in premarket trading. It quickly rebounded to gain more than 1% in the first hour after the opening bell Thursday morning as the market digested news of the new agreement, which now brings the value of the companies' joint agreements to $22.4 billion.

Livingston, N.J.-based CoreWeave provides cloud computing infrastructure specifically designed for tasks requiring massive amounts of GPU processing power, like training machine learning and AI models.

This fresh deal promises OpenAI additional computing power needed to train and operate its AI models on top of what CoreWeave already provides the AI giant. The two companies signed an initial agreement for computing power last March for $11.9 billion, then added a $4 billion agreement in May.

Read more here.

Intel (INTC) is reportedly in talks with Apple (AAPL) to have the iPhone maker invest in the company and for the two companies to work more closely together. But Bernstein analyst Stacy Rasgon said it's unlikely a collaboration (beyond an investment) would materialize anytime soon.

He noted that Apple moved from Intel's chips years ago to make its own Arm-based (ARM) chips for personal computers (PCs) that are manufactured by Intel's contract manufacturing rival, Taiwan-based TSMC (TSM).

Intel also famously passed on an offer to make chips for Apple's first iPhones in the early 2000s.

Rasgon said it's \\"unlikely\\" Apple would collaborate with Intel to co-design a chip for PCs or shift to producing its in-house PC chips in Intel's factories rather than TSMC's, writing \\"a foundry agreement with Intel seems very premature.\\"

Intel designs computing chips and leads the market for CPUs (central processing units) for data centers and PCs, but its market share has eroded in recent years as AMD (AMD) and Arm have gained ground.

Intel has always produced chips for itself, but its internal manufacturing business began to fall behind technologically over the past decade. In 2021, the company opened that business to outside customers, launching Intel Foundry Services, in a bid to breathe new life into its factories.

That hasn't worked so far: Intel Foundry Services' losses ballooned to $13 billion in its 2024 fiscal year from $7 billion in 2023, and those losses helped send Intel's stock plunging 60% last year.

Last week, Nvidia (NVDA) announced it would take a $5 billion stake in Intel, following the US government's $9 billion investment in the struggling company in August.

\\"Hence what Intel really needs is CAPABILITY, which would allow them to attract customers that would allow them to fill the capacity that the money might help them build,\\" Rasgon wrote. \\"But their capability issue have nothing to do with money; they will have to figure that out on their own.

Yahoo Finance's Claire Boston reports:

Sales of existing homes were nearly flat in August, the latest sign that high prices and limited mortgage rate relief are keeping prospective homebuyers sidelined for now.

Sales dropped 0.2% last month compared to July, to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 4 million, according to National Association of Realtors data released Thursday. Economists had been expecting a slightly bigger 1.5% decline.

So far this year, home sales are tracking slightly below last year’s levels, putting the market on pace for another year of sales at or near 30-year lows. Lawrence Yun, the NAR’s chief economist, said he expects sales in the fourth quarter to be better than last year if mortgage rates stay near current levels, though all signs point to another weak year for sales.

Read more here.

Oracle (ORCL) shares fell more than 4% Thursday as Alex Haissl, an analyst with investing firm Rothschild & Co Redburn, initiated coverage of the stock with a Sell rating.

Haissl said Oracle’s recent five-year revenue guidance for its cloud business (OCI) that sent the stock soaring is a risk, writing that \\"the market is already pricing in a risky blue-sky scenario that is unlikely to materialise,” per Bloomberg. He set a $175 price target on the stock, while shares traded around $297 on Thursday.

The decline in Oracle shares follows a nearly 2% dip from the previous trading session as the software giant sold $18 billion US investment-grade bonds.

Oracle's bond sale came as the rising AI cloud firm rushes to build AI infrastructure for its clients, which range from OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) and Meta (META) to Elon Musk's xAI (XAAI.PVT). As of this summer, Oracle was leading a record data center leasing pipeline in the US as tech giants go all in on AI infrastructure, according to TD Cowen analysts.

Earlier this week, Oracle was named as an investor to take part in the US-China TikTok deal, and the company also named two new co-CEOs in an executive leadership shake-up.

IBM (IBM) shares rose over 3% Thursday as its customer HSBC (HSBC) said it has improved its ability to predict market behavior when using IBM's quantum computers.

The London-based bank said it has integrated IBM's Quantum Heron — its latest quantum chip — with classical and AI computers.

\\"By using quantum computers to model the European market at different points in time, and feed better data to its AI workflow, HSBC saw a 34 percent reduction in the errors made by its algorithm,\\" a spokesperson for IBM told Yahoo Finance.

HSBC claims this is the first empirical evidence of quantum computers delivering measurable value for a real-world financial services problem.

\\"This is a ground-breaking world-first in bond trading,\\" HSBC 's head of quantum technologies, Philip Intallura, said in a statement. \\"It means we now have a tangible example of how today’s quantum computers could solve a real-world business problem at scale.

US stocks fell at the open on Thursday, extending declines after two consecutive days of losses.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) dropped about 0.3%, and the S&P 500 (^GSPC) lost 0.6%. Meanwhile, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) sank 0.9%.

The declines come as fresh data from the US Department of Labor showed jobless claims unexpectedly falling last week, complicating the narrative of a weakening labor market that has been fueling the case for further interest rate cuts from the Federal Reserve.

Yahoo Finance's Brooke DiPalma reports:

Starbucks (SBUX) announced plans to close unprofitable locations and cut corporate jobs as CEO Brian Niccol focuses on the company's turnaround plan.

In a letter posted to its blog and sent to employees on Thursday, Niccol shared that the company plans to eliminate 900 non-retail roles and close open positions. The memo said employees will be notified on Friday, Sept. 26, and will offer \\"severance and support packages including benefits extensions.\\"

\\"We will continue to carefully manage costs and stay focused on the key areas that drive long-term growth,\\" Niccol wrote.

This comes after the company laid off 1,100 employees earlier this year. Niccol said the company plans to use the savings to invest in its stores by adding more customer service employees. Other investments include new coffeehouse designs and innovations.

Corporate employees, including support partners and people managers, are now required to come to the office four days a week starting Sept. 30, Niccol said in July.

Read the full story here.

Data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis on Thursday showed the US economy grew at its fastest pace since 2023 in the second quarter.

Real gross domestic product (GDP) increased at an annual rate of 3.8%, a dramatic rebound from the 0.6% drop in the first quarter and above estimates for 3.3% growth.

The effects of the Trump administration's trade policies have skewed GDP readings somewhat. For instance, the first quarter decline primarily reflected a surge in imports, which are subtracted from GDP, the Commerce Department said.

Jobless claims in the US unexpectedly fell to 218,000 in the week that ended Sept. 20 from 232,000 the previous week, according to data from the Department of Labor released Thursday morning.

The 218,000 initial unemployment insurance claims were also lower than the 221,000 claims in the same week last year.

Economists tracked by Bloomberg had expected jobless claims to rise to 233,000 last week amid widening cracks in the labor market. Those cracks have featured heavily in discussions over the Fed's path to interest rate easing, as officials on the central bank's board of governors have expressed dissenting opinions over such rate cuts moving forward.

Historic parallels suggest Wall Street stocks are teetering on the edge, but the S&P 500 (^GSPC) trades like it's the new risk-free rate, Yahoo Finance's Hamza Shaban reports.

He writes in the takeaway from today's Morning Brief:

By a host of measures, stocks are trading at levels that suggest the neighbors have already called the police and the cul-de-sac rager is about to be broken up.

Price-to-earnings ratios echo the dot-com era. And buying assets at these prices can feel like a mistake because the dynamics feel untenable. FOMO has a powerful pull, but so does plain old risk avoidance.

Still, people are buying, and the mood in many quarters is bullish. The stock market's impressive returns and promise for more are in conflict with other signs that overconfidence is leading investors astray.

But there's a way to think through that tension without confirming belief in a bubble, or denying that investors are churning in froth.

What if the historical paradigms we use to gauge levels of confidence, market fundamentals, and asset prices are no longer suited to the current environment? That what we see as frothiness, and a prelude to a bursting bubble in the benchmark S&P 500, is a new baseline.

Read more here.

Shares of CarMax (KMX) fell 12% in premarket after the used-car dealership chain's quarterly results came in significantly short of Wall Street estimates.

The company's CEO, Bill Nash, described the second quarter as \\"challenging\\" in a statement alongside the second quarter report.

CarMax posted Q2 earnings per share of $0.64, compared with the $1.03 expected by analysts. Revenue also missed the mark, coming in at $6.59 billion versus the $7.05 billion estimated in a Zack's survey and $7.01 billion in the year-ago quarter.

The White House budget office directed federal agencies to devise plans to permanently reduce their workforces if the government shuts down next week, raising the stakes of an outcome that looks increasingly likely by the day.

Politico reports that the White House memo targets \\"employees who work for programs that are not legally required to continue.\\"

More:

In the memo, OMB told agencies to identify programs, projects and activities where discretionary funding will lapse on Oct. 1 and no alternative funding source is available. For those areas, OMB directed agencies to begin drafting RIF plans that would go beyond standard furloughs, permanently eliminating jobs in programs not consistent with President Donald Trump’s priorities in the event of a shutdown.

The move marks a significant break from how shutdowns have been handled in recent decades, when most furloughs were temporary and employees were brought back once Congress voted to reopen government and funding was restored. This time, OMB Director Russ Vought is using the threat of permanent job cuts as leverage, upping the ante in the standoff with Democrats in Congress over government spending.

The shutdown, set for 12:01 a.m. next Wednesday, represents an increasingly present threat to markets. President Trump this week scrapped a planned meeting with Democrats, who are seeking an extension of healthcare subsidies under the Affordable Care Act to be included in a spending bill.

Reuters has a good explainer on how shutdowns affect markets.