NEW YORK: The Nasdaq closed 1.4% lower and the S&P dipped slightly on Tuesday as investors sold off technology stocks that benefited from virus lockdowns, favouring sectors that have suffered most during the pandemic instead on hopes a Covid-19 vaccine will turn the economy around.
The heavyweight technology and consumer discretionary sectors fell sharply and communication services languished while investors favoured small caps and economically sensitive energy and industrials sectors as well as value stocks in consumer staples.
The main US indexes had hit intraday peaks on Monday after Pfizer Inc said a vaccine it is developing with German partner BioNTech SE was 90% effective against Covid-19.
“It’s the reopening trade. To the extent the economy can reopen sooner rather than later the stay-at-home stocks won’t be as valuable,” said Jim Paulsen, chief investment strategist at The Leuthold Group in Minneapolis.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 262.95 points, or 0.9%, to 29,420.92, the S&P 500 lost 4.97 points, or 0.14%, to 3,545.53 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 159.93 points to 11,553.86.
In small caps, the S&P 600 index rose 2.6%, however, and the Russell 2000 climbed 1.9%.
Amazon.com Inc, which finished down 3.5%, Facebook Inc, off 2.3%, and Microsoft, which fell 3.4%, extended Monday’s losses and weighed heavily on the tech-laden Nasdaq throughout the session. The stocks have boomed during the virus induced work-from-home trend.
After hitting a record in Monday’s session, the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index underperformed sharply on Tuesday, finishing down 3%, with Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and Xilinx all falling more than 6%.
And the S&P’s value stock index, which tends to outperform coming out of a recession, gained 1.3% on Tuesday compared with a 1.15 decline for the less economically sensitive growth index.
Trading was also choppy at times as some investors monitored for election uncertainty after US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the latest Republican to suggest President Donald Trump would not concede the White House to Democrat Joe Biden.
But Leuthold’s Paulsen said most market participants have priced in a Biden win and have been largely ignoring the Trump administration’s election outcome complaints because they have not produced evidence of problems with votes.
While President-elect Biden hailed the vaccine progress he has cautioned that it would be “many more months” before it is widely available. Meanwhile, daily new US cases topped 100,000 for the sixth straight day.
US Health Secretary Alex Azar said on Tuesday that if Pfizer submits its interim Covid-19 vaccine to health regulators as quickly as expected, the US government expects to start vaccinations in December.
Intel and Apple Inc both closed lower after Apple introduced its first notebook computer with an Apple-designed microprocessor.
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 1.80-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.53-to-1 ratio favoured advancers.
The S&P 500 posted 11 new 52-week highs and no new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 80 new highs and 20 new lows. On US exchanges 12.61 billion shares changed hands compared with the 9.88 billion average from the last 20 sessions though Tuesday’s volume was well below Monday’s 17.35 billion tally.—Reuters
Comments
Comments are closed.