Meta's Muse agent hits banks as the Nasdaq sets another record
Banks, card networks and telecoms fell on fears Meta's Muse AI agent will make switching easy. The Nasdaq still closed at a record as the S&P 500 went flat.
The app that lifted the market on Monday split it on Tuesday. Investors sold banks, card networks, insurers, travel sites and telecoms on the fear that Meta’s Muse AI agent will make it easy for customers to leave them, and the Nasdaq still closed at a record on the back of chipmakers.
The Muse selloff
Muse is an AI agent: it carries out tasks such as booking travel and making purchases on a user’s behalf, and it has reached No. 1 on Apple’s US App Store. Bloomberg reported that shares of banks, insurers and online travel agencies slid on concern that agents like it will wear down “consumer inertia,” the habit of staying with a provider rather than shopping around. The S&P 500 financials index lost nearly 2% to its lowest close since July, per Bloomberg.
In our feed, Wells Fargo (WFC) fell 3.92% to $83.15, JPMorgan (JPM) 3.42% to $340.00, Bank of America (BAC) 3.04% and Morgan Stanley (MS) 2.88%. The financials fund XLF lost 1.97%. The card networks went with them: American Express (AXP) fell 2.72%, Visa (V) 2.14% and Mastercard (MA) 2.07%. Airbnb (ABNB) lost 3.01%.
Outside our feed, Allstate fell 5.5%, Booking Holdings 3.9% and Expedia 3.7%, per Bloomberg. Charles Schwab fell about 6%, which EconCurrents tied to the latest Fed rate talk rather than to Muse, so not every financial name fell for the same reason.
Telecoms fit the pattern too. Goldman Sachs named telecoms, insurance and utilities as the industries to watch if AI agents make switching providers easier and cheaper, per Bloomberg. Verizon (VZ) fell 2.58%, T-Mobile (TMUS) 1.73% and AT&T (T) 1.38%.
Meta (META) itself slipped 0.63% after Monday’s 11.34% jump. Its annual Connect conference opens today, with the keynote at 7:00 p.m. ET.
A record on a flat day
The Nasdaq rose 0.5% to a record close, while the S&P 500 finished down less than 0.1% and the Dow lost 0.4%, per AP. Our feed shows the same gap: QQQ, which tracks the Nasdaq-100, gained 0.81%, SPY slipped 0.02% and DIA lost 0.34%. The small-cap fund IWM rose 0.57%.
Breadth was close to even. 53 of the 100 stocks and funds we track rose. Another 45 fell, and two were unchanged.
Chips did the lifting again. Micron (MU) rose 5.00% to $1,096.16, a week before it reports quarterly results. Arm (ARM) gained 3.19%, Qualcomm (QCOM) 2.08%, Applied Materials (AMAT) 1.77% and Intel (INTC) 1.71%. Nvidia (NVDA) added 0.66%.
Software split. Shopify (SHOP) rose 7.12% to $147.74 and MongoDB (MDB) 5.01%, while Adobe (ADBE) fell 4.52% to $238.25. Yahoo Finance tied Adobe’s drop to AI competition and pricing pressure across software, and GuruFocus noted that CEO Shantanu Narayen sold 125,000 shares on September 16 and 17. Cisco (CSCO) fell 4.50% to $106.44 after Piper Sandler lowered its outlook for the stock and kept a Neutral rating, per Benzinga.
Walmart (WMT) rose 2.49% and Home Depot (HD) 2.74%; we could not confirm a single cause for either move.
Where the data disagrees with the headline
“Nasdaq at a record” reads like a strong day. It was a day on which the S&P 500 did not move and its financials sector closed at a two-month low. On Monday, Muse was the reason to buy Meta and the chipmakers that power AI agents. On Tuesday, the same app was the reason to sell the companies those agents might bypass. Both reactions are about what AI agents could do, not about anything they have yet done to these companies’ earnings.
Oil and the Fed
Oil stayed below $100 after President Trump said US and Iranian officials had a “very good” meeting on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, per AP. Brent was down 0.6% at $98.68 early Wednesday. The energy fund XLE lost 1.09% on Tuesday.
The Fed’s tone has not softened. Richmond Fed President Tom Barkin said the “passing” shocks “aren’t proving to be short-lived, or one-off events,” and left the door open to further rate hikes, per Yahoo Finance. The long-bond fund TLT was little changed, down 0.06%.
This morning
Asian markets were mixed, per AP. South Korea’s Kospi rose 0.9% to 7,080.92 and Taiwan’s Taiex 0.8%, led by chipmakers: Samsung Electronics gained 3.3%, SK Hynix 1.2% and TSMC 1.6%. Hong Kong’s Hang Seng fell 1.1% to 24,821.84 and the Shanghai Composite 0.4% to 3,936.52.
Xi Jinping’s state visit to the US runs September 23 to 25. The two sides have been discussing reciprocal tariff reductions on $30 billion worth of goods each, per AP.
In after-hours trading, our feed had Micron at $1,097.88, JPMorgan at $340.69 and Visa at $362.55, all close to Tuesday’s levels.
What to watch today
- MBA mortgage applications, 7:00 a.m. ET.
- S&P Global flash PMIs for September (manufacturing, services, composite), 9:45 a.m. ET.
- EIA weekly oil inventories, 10:30 a.m. ET.
- The Treasury sells $70 billion of five-year notes at 1:00 p.m. ET.
- Earnings: Cintas, General Mills, Paychex, Cracker Barrel and Manchester United before the open; H.B. Fuller and Stitch Fix after the close.
- Meta Connect keynote, 7:00 p.m. ET.
- Xi Jinping’s state visit, September 23 to 25.
- Whether financials and card networks extend Tuesday’s losses or recover them.
- Micron reports quarterly results on September 30, after the close.
Not financial advice. iTrading Buddy summarizes publicly available market data and news; every figure above is sourced from the reporting available before the US open on the date shown. Verify anything you act on.