“As far as I’m concerned, it’s just a waste of time dealing with them.” President Donald Trump said that of Iran’s leadership on Wednesday, and Wall Street took it as the end of the ceasefire. The Dow Jones Industrial Average gave up 499.40 points, or 0.94 percent, to 52,425.75.
Trump was in Ankara, Turkey, for a NATO summit when he declared the memorandum of understanding between Washington and Tehran collapsed. He called Iran’s leaders “sick” and accused them of “killing people,” adding that Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon.” Pointing to Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general killed in a 2020 U.S. strike, he said, “They’ve killed thousands and thousands of our soldiers.”
Strikes, then a lost oil license
The collapse followed a night of fighting. U.S. forces hit several targets inside Iran late Tuesday, after what the American military described as Iranian attacks on three commercial vessels in the Strait of Hormuz. Iranian state media said the Revolutionary Guard Corps answered by striking American military targets in Bahrain and Kuwait. The U.S. Treasury also revoked a license that had allowed Iran to export oil globally.
Oil jumped. In premarket trading West Texas Intermediate rose as much as 6.2 percent to $74.79 a barrel, and Brent climbed 6.1 percent to $78.66. Daniela Hathorn, a senior market analyst at Capital.com, said traders were rebuilding a geopolitical premium that had nearly vanished in recent weeks. She cautioned that this “does not necessarily imply a sustained rally in crude, but it does challenge the view that downside risks had become dominant.”
For families in oil-importing countries, a jump like that is what shows up later at the pump and in freight bills. The VIX, Wall Street’s main volatility gauge, rose nearly 8 percent to 17.40. Gold fell 1.75 percent to $4,084.80 an ounce, a drop some analysts put down to profit-taking.
Tech shares already under pressure
The Dow had a rough Tuesday too. It touched a record high during the session, then closed 0.25 percent lower at 52,925.15. The Nasdaq Composite lost 1.16 percent as chip stocks weakened, hit by a cool market reaction to record quarterly earnings from Samsung Electronics and a Reuters report that China’s DeepSeek is developing its own semiconductor chip.
Premarket on Wednesday, Amazon fell 1.7 percent to $241.85, Apple slipped 0.37 percent to $309.52, IBM dropped 3.3 percent to $296.03, Nvidia lost 1.7 percent to $193.68 and Palantir shed 3.1 percent to $130.15.
South Korea’s KOSPI index slid more than 5 percent in one session and ended up more than 20 percent below its recent high, which put it in a bear market. It is still the best-performing major index in the world this year, according to market data.
Winners and losers
A few stocks went the other way. Walmart gained 0.8 percent after saying it would cut prices on some items, ground beef and Coca-Cola among them. Cognizant jumped 6.2 percent after widening its partnership with Google Cloud on Gemini AI tools.
Rivian fell as much as 18.1 percent after moving to sell 75 million Class A shares. Ondas Holdings dropped 6 percent even after lifting its 2026 revenue outlook to $525 million from $390 million, as drone-linked defense names including AeroVironment and Kratos sold off.
Tuesday was also the first day for SpaceX in the Nasdaq-100. The stock closed down nearly 7 percent.
