Wall Street stocks ended mixed on Friday as investors looked ahead to Nvidia's quarterly results next week and worried that the Federal Reserve may hold off on cutting US interest rates in December.

The Nasdaq ended higher and the S&P 500 finished marginally weaker after an early sell-off that dragged all three major Wall Street indexes down more than 1 percent.

Investors in recent days have fretted about the pace of rate cuts and pricey valuations of heavyweight artificial intelligence stocks that have fuelled much of the U.S. stock market's gains in recent years.

Nvidia, Palantir and Microsoft each gained more than 1 percent.

Expectations the Fed will cut rates at its December policy meeting have faded in recent days amid signs of persistent inflation, caused in part by US President Donald Trump's global tariffs. The probability of a 25-basis-point rate cut in December has fallen to under 50 percent from 67 percent last week, according to CME Group's FedWatch tool. Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid said on Friday his concerns about "too hot" inflation go well beyond the narrow effects of tariffs, signalling that he could dissent again at the Fed's December meeting should policymakers opt to cut short-term borrowing costs. He was one of two dissenters in the Fed's October decision to lower the policy rate by a quarter of a percentage point.

The S&P 500 fell 0.05 percent to end at 6,734.

The Nasdaq gained 0.13 percent to 22,900, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 0.65 percent to 47,147. (Reuters)