Investing.com – Wall Street was mixed on Monday, as investors turned their focus to a highly-anticipated Federal Reserve meeting this week that is expected to pave the way for a rate cut later this year.
The Dow lost 3 points, a negligible movement, by 9:51 AM ET (13:51 GMT), while the S&P 500 rose 4 points or 0.2% and tech-heavy Nasdaq composite surged 47 points or 0.6%, reversing some of last week's underperformance.
While no rate cut is expected when the Fed meets on Tuesday and Wednesday, traders have increased their expectations that it will cut rates as early as July, as the U.S.'s trade dispute with China cools the economy and leaves inflation below target. As such, market hopes are for a change in the Fed's language to prepare markets for a cut next month.
"I think the focus will be on what the Fed sounds like in the meeting this week," said Scott Brown, chief economist at Raymond James in St. Petersburg, Florida.
"Jerome Powell has got to be very careful about what he says, and how he frames it because you don't want the market to panic if the Fed's going to be behind the curve."
Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) was down 0.9% after news that it is buying Array Biopharma for $48 per share in cash, or $11.4 billion, including debt, while Array (NASDAQ:ARRY) shot up 57.7%.
Beyond Meat (NASDAQ:BYND) rallied 9%, while Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) jumped 1.9% after CEO Elon Musk announced he had deleted his Twitter account. Musk's use of Twitter had earned the company a fine for misleading disclosure from the Securities and Exchanges Commission, and had appeared to be an ongoing source of governance risk.
Elsewhere, Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) was up 2%.
Walt Disney (NYSE:DIS) fell 1% on an analyst downgrade, while semiconductor companies added to last week's declines in the wake of Broadcom (NASDAQ:AVGO)'s gloomy forecast for the rest of the year. Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) slipped 0.3% and Micron (NASDAQ:MU) slumped 1.2%.
In commodities, crude slumped 0.8% to a four-day low of $52.08 a barrel, gold futures rose 0.1% to $1,344.95 a troy ounce, while the U.S. dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of six major currencies, fell 0.2% to 96.887.
-Reuters contributed to this report.