US markets today: NASDAQ 100 drops 300 pts, Dow Jones and S&P 500 decline 0.5% as crude oil and bond yields surge

The US stock market opened in the red on Monday as AI safety concerns and renewed uncertainty in the US-Iran war in the Middle East resurfaced. The NASDAQ 100 plunged over 300 points, or 1%, while the Dow Jone and the S&P 500 fell 0.5% each on Monday.

The sharp bounce back in crude oil prices further soured investor sentiment. The Brent crude oil price surged over $107 per barrel after the US rejected Iran’s proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz in a phased manner.

Consequently, the US 10Y yields also surged over 5.19% on Monday, hitting 19-year high levels, further intensifying the weakness in investor sentiment, as borrowing costs surge.

At the stock-specific level, shares of NVIDIA surged over 2.3% on Monday after the company released two open-source tools, Openshell and NVIDIA Sentry, to help control rogue AI Agents.

Besides this, NVIDIA also announced a share repurchase worth $150 billion, making the total repurchase value worth $235 billion. The share repurchase program will help boost investor confidence in the company as growing concerns over AI safety recently called for slowing down AI-advancement programs.

The chip maker and the AI hypercaler stocks faced selling pressure on Monday after AI safety issues resurfaced as incidents of AI agents continued to go rogue and hack enterprise systems. Consequently, the shares of chip makers like Intel Corporation (-6.8%), SanDisk Corporation (-4.9%), Micron (-3%), and AMD (-3.4%) were among the top losers in the NASDAQ 100 index.

Meanwhile, all the megacap AI-hyperscaler stocks also plunged as much as 3.9% on Monday amid broad-based selling pressure on the US markets.

In addition, investors are also bracing for a busy week of key economic releases, including the PCE inflation report and the jobs report, which help in gauging the health of the US economy.