Shaking it off. With earnings season in full swing, investors were ready to set aside last week’s concerns over trade, regional banks, and credit problems, and focus instead on corporations’ third-quarter profits.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average notched its 12th record close of the year, gaining 0.5%. The S&P 500 was flat, and the Nasdaq Composite fell 0.2%.

A host of companies reported earnings on Tuesday, including 3M, Coca-Cola, GM, Philip Morris International, Netflix, Mattel, and PulteHome. Most had a good quarter, experts say. (Not all—both Netflix and Mattel, for instance, fell short of expectations.)

Scott Helfstein, head of Investment Strategy at Global X, writes:

That said, valuation still plays a big role in how the market receives the results. Given that indexes are at record highs, investors do have lofty expectations, which has slightly muted any overly exuberant reactions—hence the S&P’s flat performance on the day.

Big Tech earnings may be bigger catalysts, with markets looking for signs over whether the AI trade has enough steam to keep powering the U.S. economy.

And of course, we can’t forget about trade, which continues to hang over corporate America. The U.S. and China are working to de-escalate tensions after President Donald Trump threatened to slap 100% tariffs on China in retaliation of Beijing’s new export control regime that could limit the U.S.’s access to China’s minerals supply chain.

Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping are scheduled to meet at the end of the month in South Korea. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is slated to meet with Vice Premier He Lifeng this week to secure the meeting between both leaders, and—investors hope—to keep tariffs from hitting triple digits.

Just don’t get your hopes up too much, cautions my colleague, Reshma Kapadia. 

“Even if that meeting takes place, it’s unlikely to meaningfully reduce tariffs or export controls—the issues that are central to investors’ concerns in the relationship,” she wrote today. “Indeed, a recent survey of JPMorgan clients found that 44% expected the status quo on tariffs and 34% expected them to head higher.”

The Hot Stock: General Motors +14.9%
The Biggest Loser: Newmont Corporation -9.0%

Best Sector: Consumer Discretionary +1.2%
Worst Sector: Utilities -1.0%

As any jewelry enthusiast can tell you, most metals tarnish with wear. Even gold isn’t always immune to the test of time, as many investors realized today.

The precious metal had its worst day in over a decade on Tuesday, with gold continuous contract prices down 5.2% to $4,135.40 per troy ounce Tuesday afternoon. According to Dow Jones Market Data, that is the steepest one-day decline since June 2013.

A stronger U.S. dollar and profit-taking weighed on prices, reports my colleague, Nate Wolf.

It’s a stark reversal from the way gold has behaved for the better part of a year, acting “more like a growth stock than a safe-haven asset,” Nate writes. Gold prices have climbed nearly 60% this year, setting record after record.

Tuesday’s pullback could test the sustainability of that bull run. Analysts at Renaissance Macro Research seem to believe the metal has entered a “zone of unsustainable advance,” and that there is likely to be a reversal in the near future, Nate reports.

“Whenever the reversal strikes, traditional trend following techniques are likely to be too slow to react to preserve capital,” Renaissance wrote in a note over the weekend.

Platinum and silver also had a rough day, with futures down 7% and 6.7%, respectively. Both metals tend to be more volatile than gold, but have also gained significantly over the course of the year.

In face, the rise in silver prices have made the metal more popular, with investors snapping up silver bars and specially-minted coins. Some are going as far as buying up bags of dimes, quarters, and half-dollars minted before 1965, given that these coins had a 90% silver content, writes Barron’s Andrew Bary.

Fans of the metal often call these bags “junk” silver. But junk or not, “there are 715 troy ounces of silver in each $1,000 bag of coins, meaning investors are paying about $53 an ounce for the silver value of those coins, a small premium to spot silver,” Andrew writes. That’s a decent value relative to other ways of investing in silver, including buying freshly made U.S. silver Eagles, one-ounce coins produced by the U.S. mint that now trade for about $60 each.

For more on this retro approach to silver investing, read Andrew’s full piece here.

Amphenol, AT&T, Boston Scientific, CME Group, Crown Castle, FirstEnergy, GE Vernova, Globe Life, Hilton Worldwide Holdings, IBM, Kinder Morgan, Lam Research, Las Vegas Sands, Lennox International, Molina Healthcare, Moody’s, Northern Trust, NVR, O’Reilly Automotive, Raymond James Financial, SAP, Teledyne Technologies, Tesla, Thermo Fisher Scientific, United Rentals, and Westinghouse Air Brake Technologies report quarterly results.

–Dan Lam

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