(New York) The New York Stock Exchange was trading down on Tuesday, shortly after opening, struggling to maintain the recovery that began last week for longer, due to a lack of elements likely to fuel it.
At around 10:15 a.m., the Dow Jones was down 0.17%, the NASDAQ index was down 0.21% and the broader S&P 500 index was down 0.08%.
The NASDAQ and the S&P 500 are on eight consecutive sessions of gains, a first this year.
“We’ve only had one negative session since August 5,” said Adam Sarhan of 50 Park Investments. “It’s not normal to see the market go up and up. So after this big move, it’s completely logical and healthy for it to take a break.”
Fueled by favorable indicators throughout last week, the momentum is deprived, at the start of this week, of any major macro or microeconomic data.
“You could say that now is the time to consolidate, but that was already the case yesterday (Monday) and the indices still ended in the green,” Patrick O’Hare of Briefing.com observed in a note.
For Adam Sarhan, operators are also playing it safe before the intervention, Friday at 10 a.m. (Eastern time), of the president of the American central bank (Fed), Jerome Powell.
The Dow Jones was weighed down by Boeing (-3.24%), in the heart of yet another zone of turbulence.
The specialist website Air Current reported that the American group had decided to ground its fleet of 777X wide-body aircraft during testing. The aircraft manufacturer had detected a weakness in a part connecting the engine to the aircraft, according to the same source.
Contacted by AFP, Boeing did not immediately respond.
Separately, the U.S. Civil Aviation Administration has ordered the group to conduct inspections of pilot seats on hundreds of 787s.
Another member of the Dow Jones in difficulty is Disney (-1.52%).
India’s competition regulator (CCI) has internally concluded that the entertainment giant’s tie-up with Reliance in India gave both partners too great an advantage in the broadcasting rights to the Indian Premier League (IPL), according to Reuters.
The NASDAQ, for its part, limited the damage thanks to the semiconductor designer AMD (+2.91%), which remained favorably oriented after the announcement, on Monday, of the acquisition of the computer server specialist ZT Systems.
Alphabet (+0.52%), meanwhile, was still benefiting from bargain hunting, while cybersecurity group Palo Alto Networks (+7.07%) was riding high on better-than-expected results.
Another sign of the stock market’s loss of steam was that it was not capitalizing on the easing of bond rates. The yield on 10-year US government bonds stood at 3.83%, compared with 3.87% the previous day at the close.
Despite what was shaping up to be a wait-and-see session, Adam Sarhan sees the leading indices of the American stock market exceeding their July highs in the medium term.
“The Fed is about to lower rates, which will stimulate the economy and Wall Street,” he recalls.
Elsewhere in the stock market, DIY store chain Lowe’s (+0.80%) was supported by the publication of a profit that exceeded expectations, which, in the eyes of investors, offset the downward revision of its revenue forecasts for the full year.
The Mooresville, North Carolina, company cited lower retail sales and “a pressured economic environment.”
Low-cost carrier Alaska Airlines rose (+0.11%) after reporting the end of the review period allocated to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) to potentially challenge its proposed acquisition of competitor Hawaiian Airlines. At the end of this period, the DOJ did not express any reservations.
Paramount Global (-1.99%) reacted negatively to a report in the Wall Street Journal that businessman Edgar Bronfman Jr. had submitted a merger offer to the media group that would compete with that of Skydance.
The heir to the Canadian spirits group Seagram is proposing a valuation similar to that detailed by Skydance, without massively diluting Paramount’s existing shareholders.