Alex Ossola

The Middle East war and the inflation it's causing weighed on markets today.

The Nasdaq led the losses, dropping 2 percent.

Worries about AI have caused a series of volatile trading sessions this month.

The Dow fell 1.9 percent, its worst one-day decline since October.

And the S&P closed 1.6 percent lower.

Futures for Brent Crude, the international oil benchmark, rose 1.8 percent to more than $93 a barrel.

On Friday, SpaceX is expected to make its stock market debut in the biggest initial public offering of all time.

It'll be a particularly big deal for everyday investors who, over the past few years, have coalesced into a market-moving force and traded stocks at unprecedented volumes.

Journal Markets reporter Hannah Aaron Lang has been covering the retail investor revolution and is here to tell us what this means for SpaceX.

So, Hannah, how is Musk thinking about retail investors on a sort of philosophical level?

I want to talk a little bit about what an IPO like this means for these retail investors.

So company stock can be kind of erratic after an IPO, right?

It could go way, way up or, of course, way, way down.

What kind of opportunities and risks does that present for these retail investors?

Thanks, Hannah.

And in international news, last night, violence broke out in Northern Ireland.

A video showed a man stabbing a victim on a street in Belfast, and a Sudanese asylum seeker was charged with attempted murder.

That video went viral, and hours later, groups of masked men targeted minorities.

Cars, buses and some homes were set on fire.

In a news conference today in Belfast, Northern Ireland Secretary Hilary Benn condemned the violence.