New York Report: Falls in bank shares drag Wall St lower
US stocks fell yesterday, erasing most of the S&P 500’s year-to-date gain, as banking and technology stocks led the sell off.
The benchmark S&P 500 turned nearly flat for the year after falling almost one per cent this week as many of the market’s biggest trading favorites lost their momentum.
“The decliners once again are the tech and small-cap names. The decline is not as steep as it was earlier this week, but the continued weakness we see in these sectors suggests that investors are becoming more cautious as money continues to leave the stock market,” said Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist at Schaeffer’s Investment Research.
A steep drop in Citigroup shares, which suffered their biggest daily decline since November 2012, helped push the S&P 500 lower a day after the Federal Reserve rejected the bank’s capital plan.
The S&P financial index lost 0.6 per cent and was the worst-performing sector.
But the S&P 500 managed to hold above the 1,840 level, which has recently acted as support, as the end of the quarter approached and money managers engaged in “window dressing,” adjusting positions to improve the look of their portfolios.
The Dow Jones industrial average dipped 4.76 points or 0.03 percent, to end at 16,264.23. The S&P 500 lost 3.52 points or 0.19 per cent, to close at 1,849.04. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 22.346 points or 0.54 per cent, to finish at 4,151.232.
At the close, the S&P 500 was up just a fraction of a point for the year.