NEW YORK — U.S. stocks held relatively steady in a calm Tuesday on Wall Street, as earnings reporting season ramped up for big companies.

The S&P 500 slipped 8.67 points, or 0.2%, to 5,555.74. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged down by 57.35, or 0.1%, to 40,358.09, and the Nasdaq composite dipped 10.22, or 0.1%, to 17,997.35.

But the smaller stocks in the Russell 2000 continued their big run and rose 1%. They’ve flipped the market’s leaderboard recently and zoomed higher amid hopes for coming cuts to interest rates.

The mixed trading came as dozens of companies reported their results for the spring, with the headliners of Alphabet and Tesla coming after trading closed for the day. Expectations are high, and analysts are forecasting the strongest profit growth for S&P 500 companies broadly since late 2021, according to FactSet.

UPS was one of the heaviest weights on the S&P 500 and tumbled 12.1% after delivering weaker profit and revenue for the spring than analysts expected.

But CEO Carol Tomé said the company’s U.S. business delivered more packages than a year earlier, its first such growth in nine quarters, and called it a “significant turning point for our company.”

Nvidia was the stock most forcefully pushing downward on the S&P 500. Its loss of 0.8% for the day was relatively modest, but the S&P 500 gives more weight to bigger stocks, and Nvidia is worth more than $3 trillion.

Comcast dropped 2.6% after reporting revenue for the spring that fell short of expectations. Its biggest declines came from lower attendance at its U.S. theme parks and from its studios business, which didn’t have as big hits as last year’s “The Super Mario Bros.” and “Fast X” movies.

Helping to offset those losses was GE Aerospace, which flew 5.7% higher after beating analysts’ forecasts for profit in the spring and raising its forecast for earnings over the full year.