Stocks trade mixed; banks, energy sectors gain, tech falls
Stocks were mixed on Wall Street Monday as gains for banks and energy companies got checked by drops in the technology sector
TOKYO — Wall Street’s major stock indexes were mixed in afternoon trading Monday, with losses by technology and health care companies outweighing gains elsewhere in the market.
The S&P 500 has been essentially flat for much of the day. It was down 0.1% as of 2:23 p.m. Eastern. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 144 points, or 0.4%, to 34,942 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell 0.4%.
The benchmark S&P 500 had more gainers than losers. Banks made solid gains as bond yields continued climbing, which allows them to charge higher interest rates on loans. The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 1.48% from 1.46% late Friday. Bank of America gained 3%.
Oil prices rose 2.2% and supported gains for energy stocks. Exxon Mobil rose 3.1%.
The technology sector, which carries an outsized weight within the S&P 500, fell 0.9% overall. Microsoft fell 1.7%.
A measure of small-company stocks did better than the major indexes in a sign that investors were still confident about future economic growth. The Russell 2000 index rose 1.8%.
Markets have had a choppy month so far and the S&P 500 is on pace to shed 1.6% in September, which would mark the first monthly loss since January. Investors have been trying to gauge just how much room the economy has to grow amid waves of COVID-19 crimping consumer spending and job growth while inflation remains a concern.
The economic recovery started strong in 2021, but analysts and economists have been tempering their forecasts for the rest of the year. In a survey being released Monday, the National Association for Business Economics found that its panel now expects full-year economic growth of 5.6%, down from a forecast for 6.7% growth in NABE’s previous survey in May. However, economists raised their forecast for 2022 economic growth to 3.5% from a previous outlook of 2.8%.
Consumer spending has been the key driver for the economic recovery and it has been crimped in part by rising cases of COVID-19 because of the highly contagious delta variant. Investors will get a glimpse into how that could continue to play out on Tuesday when The Conference Board releases its consumer confidence index for September.
Wall Street has been facing an otherwise quiet period for corporate news as companies prepare to start reporting their latest quarterly results in the next few weeks. The next round of corporate statements could give investors a better sense of the actual impact supply chain and labor disruptions are having on sales and profits.
Markets in Europe edged higher while Asian markets were mixed.
