<body><p>STORY: Stocks started the week on a down note, with the Dow falling about six tenths of one percent, while the S&P 500 dropped two tenths and the Nasdaq ended basically flat.</p><p>:: Archive</p><p>Investors looked for moves toward de-escalation in the Middle East while they waited for earnings reports due from major technology companies later in the week.</p><p>Melissa Brown, managing director of investment decision research at SimCorp, says the technology firms will have to post significant earnings growth to maintain their lofty trading levels. </p><p>“Every company, whether it's Google or Tesla, obviously they have very different business models and different drivers of their business. But overall, I think to justify the high valuations that we see in a lot of those names, we would need to see good earnings growth, not just kind of your run-of-the-mill 10%, but you'd want to see higher earnings growth on top of good margins as well. So, we want the businesses to be profitable and growing.”</p><p>:: Archive</p><p>Meanwhile, Yemen's Iran-aligned Houthis said on Monday that they were imposing a naval blockade on Saudi Arabia, opening a new front in the U.S.-Iran war and widening the threat to global energy supplies and trade beyond the Gulf. </p><p>But a senior Iranian official told Reuters that mediators have passed Iran a proposal to de-escalate the war with the U.S. that would offer a 10-day ceasefire to find ways to revive an interim deal reached last month.</p><p>Stocks on the move included Paramount Skydance which lost two percent and Warner Brothers Discovery which slipped almost four percent after a judge halted their $110 billion merger temporarily as a coalition of states argued it would irreparably harm competition.</p><p>And shares of Domino’s Pizza gained two percent after the chain’s quarterly revenue edged past Wall Street estimates.</p></body>
