Tuesday's early afternoon trade: Index stumble as stimulus talks loom

NEW YORK: US stocks fell on Tuesday as investors awaited progress on Washington's coronavirus aid plan, with the blue-chip Dow index weighed down by 3M and McDonald's shares after the companies posted quarterly profits that missed estimates. Industrial conglomerate 3M Co dropped 4.3% as it reported a plunge in demand across its business units in the second quarter.

McDonald's Corp fell 2.5% after posting a bigger-than-expected drop in global same-store sales. Of the 130 S&P 500 companies that have reported, about 80% of them surpassed significantly lowered forecasts for quarterly profit, according to Refinitiv IBES data, better than the average of 71% companies beating profit estimates over the past four quarters.

At 12:44 p.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 124.30 points, or 0.47%, at 26,460.47 and the S&P 500 was down 4.65 points, or 0.14%, at 3,234.76. The Nasdaq Composite was down 38.04 points, or 0.36%, at 10,498.22.

A major focus this week will be results from Wall Street's trillion-dollar market value companies - Apple Inc, Amazon.com Inc and Alphabet Inc - as well as Facebook Inc. Industrials and consumer discretionary stocks weighed the most on the benchmark S&P 500 index.