General Mills Sinks 7% After Warning of Customer Unease

A quiet finish for US stocks Tuesday masked big swings underneath the surface.

• The S&P 500 rose 7.05 points, or 0.1%, to 6,843.22 after swinging between a gain of 0.5% and a loss of nearly 1%.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 32.26, or 0.1%, to 49,553.19.
• The Nasdaq composite gained 31.71 points, or 0.1% to 22,578.38.

Paramount Skydance helped lead the market after Warner Bros. Discovery allowed it to make its best and final offer to buy the entertainment company, the AP reports. Nvidia swung between being one of the heaviest weights on the market and one of its biggest strengths amid worries about the downside of artificial intelligence.

• General Mills sank 7% after the company behind the Cheerios, Nature Valley, and Pillsbury brands said customers are feeling uneasy. It cut its forecast for an underlying measure of profit for 2026, saying declines would likely be sharper than it earlier expected. Several surveys have recently shown weak confidence among US households, which are struggling with inflation that remains higher than anyone would like, a job market coming off a weak year of growth and worries about tariffs.
• Genuine Parts, which sells auto and industrial replacement parts, said it's also "navigating a dynamic environment" while reporting weaker results for the latest quarter than analysts expected. It plans to split into two separate, publicly traded companies in early 2027, with one focusing on auto parts and the other on industrial parts. Genuine Parts' stock dropped 14.6%

Helping to support the market was Warner Bros. Discovery. It rose 2.7% after saying it was trying to get the "best and final" buyout offer from Paramount, which is trying to top an offer from Netflix to buy the entertainment company. Paramount Skydance rose 4.9%, and Netflix was up 0.2%. Drops for some Big Tech stocks were the heaviest weights on the market Tuesday, including a 1.2% fall for Alphabet. The moves were tentative, though, and Nvidia swung between being one of the market's heaviest weights and one of its biggest strengths. It ended up rising 1.2%.

Markets need such Big Tech companies, which are Wall Street's most influential, to stabilize and "need to see less sell first/ask questions later behavior from investors," according to Sameer Samana, head of global equities and real assets at Wells Fargo Investment Institute. Last week, Wall Street shook when stocks of software and other companies tumbled as investors hunted for companies that could be potential losers if AI ends up remaking the world and their industries. "Overall, the market is still close to record highs, but it may not feel that way to some investors because of the sharp sell-offs that seem to derail upswings almost as soon as they begin," according to Chris Larkin at E-Trade from Morgan Stanley.