Some of Wall Street’s brightest stars lost more of their shine on Tuesday after another report said US households are getting more pessimistic about the economy.

The S&P 500 fell 0.5 percent to 5,995 – it's fourth straight drop after setting an all-time high last week.

The Nasdaq composite sank 1.4 percent to 19,026 as several influential Big Tech companies lost momentum and screeched lower.

But the majority of stocks nevertheless rose, which helped the Dow Jones Industrial Average add 159 points, or 0.4 percent to 43,621.

The US stock market has been generally struggling since the middle of last week after several weaker-than-expected reports on the economy thudded onto Wall Street.

On Tuesday, the latest said confidence among US consumers is falling by more than economists expected.

The pessimism hit high-momentum areas of the market in particular, those that had seen waves of euphoric investors pile in during recent years.

Nvidia fell 2.8 percent, for example, while Tesla tumbled 8.4 percent. They were the two heaviest weights on the S&P 500.

Bitcoin likewise sank, falling back toward US$88,000, which dragged down stocks of companies in the crypto industry.

MicroStrategy, the company that’s raised money in order to buy more bitcoin and now goes by the name Strategy, fell 11.4 percent.

Zoom Communications dropped 8.5 percent even though it reported stronger results for the latest quarter than expected.

They helped offset a 2.8 percent rise for Home Depot, which delivered a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Along with Home Depot, the majority of stocks within the S&P 500 rose.

The pace of profit reports is slowing, but the potentially most anticipated report is still to come on Wednesday. That’s Nvidia, which has grown to become one of Wall Street’s most influential stocks because of nearly insatiable demand for its chips.

Wednesday will provide the first earnings report for the company and its CEO, Jensen Huang, since a Chinese upstart, DeepSeek, upended the artificial-intelligence industry by saying it developed a large language model that can compete with big US rivals without having to use the most expensive chips. (AP)