Wall Street stocks treaded water early Wednesday as the market tried to rebound following the prior session's retreat on a pullback in many large tech shares.

Briefing.com analyst Patrick O'Hare noted that Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Tuesday had characterized equities as "fairly highly valued." 

The statement was consistent with commentators who have pointed to the equity market's lofty ratio of stock price to earnings compared with historic averages.

That comment helped prompt Tuesday's selling. The question for Wednesday is the extent to which the market will "buy the dip," O'Hare said.

About 20 minutes into trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 0.1 percent at 46,334.12.

The broad-based S&P 500 slipped 0.1 percent to 6,652.51, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index also lost 0.1 percent at 22,545.98.

Among individual companies, Vancouver-based Lithium Americas shot up 79 percent after reports that the Trump administration was in talks to take an equity stake in the mining company as part of a renegotiation of a government loan for a Nevada mining project.