NEW YORK, Feb 24, 2026, 12:22 (EST) — Regular session
The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) tacked on 304.33 points, or 0.62%, reaching 49,108.39 by 11:36 a.m. ET on Tuesday. IBM, Salesforce, and Home Depot drove the gains as investors rotated back into battered blue chips. UnitedHealth, though, weighed on the index as one of its biggest laggards. 1
Plenty of uncertainty still hangs over the rebound. Investors are juggling Anthropic’s fresh batch of “plug-ins”—extra tools designed to integrate AI with everyday business tasks—while also trying to parse President Donald Trump’s changing approach to tariffs. “The market doesn’t only have one particular worry,” said Peter Cardillo, chief market economist at Spartan Capital Securities, singling out AI, geopolitics, macro risks, and trade policy. 2
Monday’s drop was sharp: The Dow slumped 821.91 points, or 1.66%. A Supreme Court decision ruled Trump exceeded his authority by leveraging an economic emergency law to set reciprocal tariffs, sparking concerns. Investors were also sizing up which firms stand the most to lose from AI shakeups. “Sell first, assess later”—that’s how Tom Hainlin, national investment strategist at U.S. Bank Wealth Management, put it. 3
Home Depot gave investors something a bit more traditional to chew on. The retailer edged past Wall Street’s quarterly numbers and stuck with its yearly outlook, crediting steady demand from pro contractors while homeowners held off on bigger remodel jobs. CFO Richard McPhail called it a “frozen housing environment” lingering since 2023. The company’s still weighing the impact of fresh tariffs, after a 10% duty hit non-exempt goods Tuesday and Trump floated the idea of bumping that to 15%. 4
The AI narrative that dragged markets down yesterday did a sharp turn, lifting stocks after Anthropic announced it’s rolling out new plug-ins with LSEG, FactSet, Salesforce’s Slack, and DocuSign. That news gave a jolt to software shares. “Software stocks and the IGV particularly are just massively oversold,” said Dennis Dick, chief market strategist at Stock Trader Network. 5
IBM took a hard hit Monday—the sharpest single-day tumble in over 25 years. The selloff came after Anthropic announced its Claude Code tool might speed up modernization of COBOL, that old but critical programming language still running on IBM mainframes in banks, insurers, and government agencies. Anthropic claimed their AI could overhaul COBOL codebases in “quarters instead of years.” 6
Deal news in the AI space just keeps coming. Advanced Micro Devices struck a deal to supply Meta Platforms with as much as $60 billion in AI chips over five years. Meta also secured an option on up to a 10% stake. Analysts see it as a clear signal: companies are scrambling to shore up chip sources outside Nvidia. “Meta is locking in supply, diversifying away from a single vendor,” Hargreaves Lansdown senior equity analyst Matt Britzman said. AMD, for its part, highlighted that these chips are focused on “inference”—responding to real-time prompts using trained models. 7
Tariff numbers are in flux, and that’s rattling markets. According to Reuters, no one seems sure about the timing of the duty hikes, potential carve-outs, or if all countries will get hit with identical rates. Yale’s Budget Lab, for its part, put the average effective tariff at 13.7% following Trump’s most recent decision. 8
Investors are zeroed in on Wednesday, when Nvidia drops its results—and the market wants to see if the flood of AI spending by Big Tech is actually fueling profit gains for chipmakers. “People are so concerned about AI spending – whether we’re in a bubble,” said Ivana Delevska, chief investment officer at Spear Invest. The Street, based on LSEG data, is looking for Nvidia’s quarterly profit to surge by more than 62%, with revenue estimated near $66 billion. 9
