NEW YORK: Wall Street stocks tumbled for a second straight session on Thursday (Feb 9) as Treasury bond yields pushed higher, while analysts pointed to the consolidation of earlier gains.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 249.13 points, or 0.73%, to 33,699.88, the S&P 500 lost 36.36 points, or 0.88%, to 4,081.5 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 120.94 points, or 1.02%, to 11,789.58.
“The market had a very good rally over the last five or six weeks and now it’s normal and healthy to see (it) pull back and digest that big run it just had,” said Adam Sarhan of 50 Park Investments.
Stocks had opened higher in connection with a retreat in the yield of the 10-year US Treasury note, which is seen as a proxy for US interest rate policies. But yields later advanced, a reversal that coincided with the major stock indices tumbling into the red.
“The stock market started today’s session with a distinct bullish bias, but then Treasury yields moved up and that took some of the steam out of the positive market today,” said Jason Ware, chief investment officer at Albion Financial Group in Salt Lake City, Utah. He said investors were also still digesting recent comments from Fed officials.
Art Hogan, an analyst at B. Riley Financial, said investors are shifting into “wait-and-see mode” ahead of next week’s US inflation report, which could have bearings on the Federal Reserve’s future policy decisions.
Among individual companies, Disney finished 1.3% lower after an earlier rally as the company announced plans to eliminate 7,000 jobs in a cost-cutting drive.
PepsiCo gained 1% following better-than-expected profits as the soda and snacks giant raised its dividend.
Google parent Alphabet fell 4.5%, extending a pullback on worries about the tech giant’s artificial intelligence initiative. This came after an ad mistakenly identified the James Webb Space Telescope as the first to take pictures of a planet outside Earths solar system. That honour actually belongs to the European Very Large Telescope. – AFP, Reuters