Stock Futures Little Changed Ahead of Expected Fed Rate Cut; Treasury Yields Slip

Apple Stock’s Not-So-Magnificent Year

25 minutes ago

The Magnificent Seven is living up to its name this year, with one glaring exception. 

Apple (AAPL) shares have stalled out, with the iPhone maker’s stock down 5% in 2025 as of Tuesday’s close. Tesla (TSLA) and Amazon (AMZN), the Mag 7’s next-worst performers, are up single digits, and the remainder of the group—Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), Alphabet (GOOGL) and Meta Platforms (META)—has gained between 20% and 33%. The Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF (MAGS) is up 18% for the year, compared with the S&P 500’s 12% gain.

Artificial intelligence, the technology that’s sent so many stocks soaring, is the main reason Apple has struggled. The consensus on Wall Street is that Apple was slow out of the gate in the AI race, and has failed to deliver with the AI features released so far. 

While other tech giants quickly pivoted to all things AI when ChatGPT took off in late 2022, it took Apple two years to launch its first major AI tool, Apple Intelligence. In the year since, Apple has delayed new features, raising concerns that the company lacks a clear strategy to deploy the increasingly ubiquitous technology.

The Trump administration’s efforts to revive U.S. manufacturing haven’t helped matters. Apple makes the vast majority of its products in China and neighboring countries that may face high tariff rates. While Apple products are currently exempt from tariffs, the White House has repeatedly caught industry off guard with sudden and dramatic changes to trade policy.

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–Colin Laidley

Meta Wants AI-Powered Smart Glasses to Drive New Growth

25 minutes ago

Meta Platforms is looking to AI-powered glasses to drive growth, which some Wall Street analysts said could help position the tech giant as an early leader in a new category of devices.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg is widely expected to showcase Meta’s (META) latest AI glasses, called “Hypernova,” at its “Connect” developer conference Wednesday and Thursday.(The keynote address is set to start at 8 p.m. ET Wednesday, Register for the livestream here.) Meta’s existing glasses have shown some signs of success, with sales of its Ray-Ban AI glasses more than tripling in the first half of the year from a year ago.

The Hypernova glasses, developed with Ray-Ban and Oakley owner EssilorLuxottica, are viewed as a shift in Meta’s AI product strategy away from virtual reality headsets. They come with more smart glasses expected from competitors: Apple (AAPL), South Korea’s Samsung, and Amazon (AMZN) plan to launch their own versions next year and beyond, HSBC analysts wrote Tuesday.

Zuckerberg during a conference call in July said he sees the AI glasses becoming a major opportunity for the company and the “main way that we integrate superintelligence into our day-to-day lives,” according to a transcript provided by AlphaSense.

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–Nisha Gopalan

Fed Drama May Come From ‘Dot Plot,’ Powell Remarks

41 minutes ago

With a Federal Reserve interest-rate cut a near certainty, intrigue is likely to come from elsewhere at the central bank today.

Traders are pricing in a 96.1% chance that the Fed will cut its benchmark interest rate by 25 basis points and the remaining 3.9% are expecting a 50-basis-point cut, according to the CME Group’s FedWatch tool.

When the Federal Open Market Committee wraps up its two-day meeting, members may divided on the decision and the course of monetary policy to come. The lineup itself isn’t exactly stable, with the Senate voting just Monday to confirm President Donald Trump’s newest appointee, White House economist Stephen Miran, while that night an appeals court ruled against President Trump in his efforts to oust Fed Governor Lisa Cook for allegedly falsifying mortgage documents.

Miran and two other Trump appointees to the Fed, Governors Christopher Waller and Michelle Bowman, may vote for a more aggressive rate cut, which could result in an unusually divided FOMC. Fed watchers also will be paying attention to the so-called “dot plot,” which shows officials’ forecasts for where they think their benchmark rate should be in the coming years. Markets are pricing in a “substantial loosening,” Samuel Tombs, chief U.S. economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote in a note to clients.

Investors also will be monitoring comments from Fed chair Jerome Powell at 2:30 p.m. ET, 30 minutes after the release of the central bank’s decision on rates. Powell could face a “challenging press conference” as he tries to summarize the FOMC’s debate, Deutsche Bank Chief U.S. Economist Matthew Luzzetti wrote in a research note.

US Stock Futures Tick Lower Ahead of Fed Decision

1 hr 29 min ago

Futures contracts connected to the Dow Jones Industrial Average were fractionally lower early Wednesday.

S&P 500 futures were down about 0.1%.

Nasdaq 100 contracts also were down roughly 0.1%.