Wall Street holds near its record after Brent oil falls below $100 per barrel

NEW YORK (AP) — The U.S. stock market held near its record high on Tuesday after oil prices eased again.

The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged, edging down by less than 0.1%, and is sitting 0.4% below its all-time high set last month. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dipped 185 points, or 0.4%, while the Nasdaq composite added 0.5% to its own record.

Stocks had been higher in the morning, when the price for a barrel of Brent crude briefly fell below $98. But oil prices later trimmed their losses, and Brent settled at $99.25 per barrel, down 1.1%.

That’s down from the nearly $110 that it touched last week, but it’s still much more expensive than the $72 it was fetching before the war with Iran began. It’s been swinging with uncertainty about when the war will allow crude to freely flow again from the Middle East to customers worldwide.

On Wall Street, AutoZone rose 3.3% after the retailer reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, though its revenue fell short. CEO Phil Daniele said the auto parts seller faced “a difficult selling environment” in the first two months of the quarter, but it improved afterward and “we feel we are well positioned for sales growth” in its upcoming fiscal year.

At Thor Industries, which sells recreational vehicles, the mood was more muted. CEO Bob Martin said expensive fuel, high interest rates and still-high inflation are stretching its customers’ budgets, and business “never reached the inflection point many in the industry expected” in its latest fiscal year.

Its stock rose 5.5%, though, after it delivered a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected.

Such strong profit reports are one of the main reasons the U.S. stock market has reached the brink of its all-time high despite expensive oil and jitters about whether stocks in the artificial-intelligence industry shot too high.

Many companies are close to closing the books on their third quarter of the year, which ends with September. And analysts are forecasting companies in the S&P 500 will report overall growth of nearly 29% for the quarter from a year earlier, according to FactSet.

If they’re right, it would be the third straight quarter of growth better than 25% for the index. And stock prices tend to follow the track of corporate profits over the long term.