Wall Street drifts to mixed finish Stock market today: Wall Street drifts to a mixed finish ahead of a frenetic week

NEW YORK - U.S. stock indexes drifted to a mixed finish Monday to kick off a week full of earnings reports from Wall Street's most influential companies and a Federal Reserve meeting on interest rates.

The S&P 500 edged up 4.44 points, or 0.1%, to 5,463.54, coming off its first back-to-back weekly losses since April. The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 49.41, or 0.1%, to 40,539.93, and the Nasdaq composite added 12.32, or 0.1%, to 17,370.20.

ON Semiconductor helped lead the market with a jump of 11.5% after the supplier to the auto and other industries reported stronger profits for the spring than analysts expected. McDonald's rose 3.7% despite reporting profit and revenue for the latest quarter that fell shy of forecasts. Analysts said its performance at U.S. restaurants wasn't as bad as some investors had feared.

They helped offset slides for oil-and-gas companies, which were some of the heaviest weights on the market after the price of oil sank back toward where it was two months ago. ConocoPhillips lost 1.6%, and Exxon Mobil fell 1% amid worries about how much crude China's faltering economy will burn.

Several of Wall Street's biggest names are set to report their own results later this week: Microsoft on Tuesday, Meta Platforms on Wednesday and Apple and Amazon on Thursday. Their stock movements carry extra weight on Wall Street because they are among the market's largest by total value.

Such Big Tech stocks drove the S&P 500 to dozens of records this year, in part on investors' frenzy around artificial-intelligence technology, but they ran out of momentum this month amid criticism they've grown too expensive, and as alternatives began to look more attractive. Last week, investors found profit reports from Tesla and Alphabet underwhelming, which raised concerns that other stocks in what's known as the "Magnificent Seven" group of Big Tech stocks could also fail to impress.

"AI hype days are over," according to Bank of America strategists led by Savita Subramanian. "Time to show monetization."

What's helped support the U.S. stock market even as those Big Tech behemoths weakened has been strength from other areas that had been beaten down by high interest rates meant to get inflation under control. Smaller stocks in particular soared on expectations that slowing inflation will get the Federal Reserve to soon begin cutting interest rates.

That pattern unwound a bit on Monday, as the majority of Big Tech stocks rose while the smaller stocks in the Russell 2000 index slumped 1.1%. But the Russell 2000 is still up by a market-leading 9.2% for the month so far.