Wall Street dropped on Thursday but the losses were less severe than the brutal sell-off in the previous session as a bounce in technology stocks helped limit losses.
Nine of the 11 S&P major sectors were lower, led by energy and health stocks. Technology companies, which led the sell-off on Wednesday, managed to post slight gains. The stock market is caught amidst a storm of worries ranging from the impact of trade tensions on corporate profits to Treasury yields at multi-year highs and, more recently, Hurricane Michael making landfall in Florida.
While stocks had coped well with rising trade tensions between the United States and China over the past few months, the sharp rise in bond yields earlier this month, accompanied by hawkish comments from Federal Reserve officials, proved to be a tipping point that triggered the sell-off on Wall Street.
A smaller-than-anticipated rise in consumer prices, which eased some fears of inflation pressures rising, helped stocks take a bit of a breather around the open, but the slide soon resumed.
“Nobody is talking about inflation anymore because they are just shell-shocked from what happened yesterday,” said Michael Antonelli, managing director, institutional sales trading at Robert W. Baird in Milwaukee.The high-growth technology sector was up 0.4%, coming off a 4.8% slide on Wednesday.
At 9:37 p.m. IST, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 137.02 points, or 0.54%, at 25,461.72, the S&P 500 was down 17.76 points, or 0.64%, at 2,767.92 and the Nasdaq Composite was down 2.25 points, or 0.03%, at 7,419.80.
