Stock market today: Wall Street hovers around records ahead of Nvidia earnings and inflation data

NEW YORK -- Wall Street is hovering around record highs at the start of a week featuring another full slate of corporate earnings and the government’s latest inflation reading.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.4% in morning trading Monday. The benchmark index is within 1% of its record set in July. The Dow Jones Industrial average rose 14 points, or less than 0.1%, to 41,192 as of 11:45 a.m. Eastern. It is hovering around its record.

The Nasdaq slipped 0.9%. It was weighed down by several technology companies that tend to tip the market because of their big values. Microsoft slipped 0.8%.

Oil prices jumped 3.1% after Israel and the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah traded heavy fire on Sunday, triggering potential supply worries.

Bond yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 3.81% from 3.80% late Friday.

Investors have a busy week ahead that kicked off Monday with a surprisingly good report showing that orders for long-lasting goods from U.S. factories, including cars, jumped 9.9% in July. An update on consumer confidence is on tap for Tuesday and the U.S. will provide a revised estimate on Thursday of economic growth during the second quarter.

Semiconductor company Nvidia reports its latest financial results on Wednesday. It has been a big beneficiary of Wall Street’s mania around artificial intelligence, becoming one of the stock market’s most massive companies, with a total value topping $3 trillion. Its stock slipped 2.1% Monday, but it is up 156% for the year.

Others reporting this week include Kohl’s, Chewy, Salesforce and Dollar General.

The key report for investors this week will come on Friday, when the the government serves up its latest data on inflation with the PCE, or personal consumption and expenditures report for July. It is the Federal Reserve's preferred measure of inflation.

Fed Chair Jerome Powell strongly signaled on Friday that the central bank is planning to start cutting its benchmark interest rate, which currently stands at a two-decade high. The Fed raised interest rates in order to tame inflation back to its target of 2%. Inflation has been steadily easing and economists polled by FactSet expect the latest PCE data to show a 2.6% inflation reading.

Traders are forecasting a rate cut to come at the Fed's meeting in September. They expect the central bank to trim its main interest rate by at least 1 percentage point by the end of the year, according to data from CME Group.