U.S. Stocks Slip as Investors Weigh Trade Talks
22 Mai 2018 - 9:51PM
Dow Jones News
By Riva Gold
-- FTSE 100 breaks new ground
-- Italian assets steady
-- Brent crude rises
U.S. stocks slipped Tuesday, a day after waning concerns about
trade tensions between the U.S. and China had helped send major
global indexes to their highest close in months.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 102 points, or 0.4%, to
24912, after rising Monday above 25000 for the first time since
March. The S&P 500 fell 0.1%, and the Nasdaq Composite added
less than 0.1%.
Six of the 11 sectors in the S&P 500 slipped, including the
industrial stocks that powered Monday's rally after Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin said the U.S. would suspend its efforts to
apply tariffs to $150 billion in Chinese imports. Boeing was the
biggest drag on the Dow industrials, falling 2%, while Caterpillar
dropped 0.8%.
Financial stocks, meanwhile, were a bright spot, climbing 1.2%
in the S&P 500. Those shares rallied as the House was expected
to vote on a bill that would relieve small and regional lenders
from a number of restrictions tied to the 2010 Dodd-Frank
financial-overhaul law. If the bill becomes law, it would
drastically cut the number of banks subject to heightened Federal
Reserve oversight by raising a key regulatory threshold to $250
billion in assets from $50 billion.
Justin Wiggs, managing director for Stifel Nicolaus, said
substantive deregulation is harder to obtain for bigger financial
firms, but that regionals stand to gain.
"They would see outsized benefit," he said.
The KBW Bank Index, which includes 24 different banks including
large lenders like Bank of America and smaller firms like KeyCorp
and Comerica, was up 1.7%.
In corporate news, shares of Micron Technology climbed 8.8%
after the memory-chip maker unveiled a $10 billion stock-buyback
plan. Shares of J.C. Penney fell 5.8% after Chief Executive Marvin
Ellison said he was leaving the company to run Lowe's. Shares of
Lowe's fell 1.2%.
In other trade-related news, The Wall Street Journal reported
the U.S. and China agreed on the broad outline of a deal that would
save imperiled Chinese telecom giant ZTE. President Donald Trump
said Tuesday that he "envisions" the company being fined as much as
$1.3 billion but noted there is no final agreement regarding the
firm.
"Anything tied to economic growth and the business cycle is
going to be bid up in this environment where we get news that maybe
the 'trade war' is less of a risk than it was prior to the
comments," said Jason Ware, chief investment officer at Albion
Financial Group.
Recent news "suggests that things are on hold for now, as far as
this escalating into something that would be truly bad for the
global economy and therefore global markets," he added.
For some, news around trade without specifics carries less
weight.
Brian Smoluch, portfolio manager for Hood River Capital
Management, who focuses on small-cap firms, said general comments
on trade with China are "too general to make any sort of concrete
investment move."
"The [market's] short-term gyrations are unpredictable," he
said.
The Stoxx Europe 600 edged up 0.3%, while the U.K.'s FTSE 100
rose 0.2% to a record close, supported for most of May by gains in
the U.S. dollar against the British pound and a rally in commodity
prices that has lifted shares of energy and mining companies.
The WSJ Dollar Index rose less than 0.1%, while U.S. crude fell
0.2% to $72.13 a barrel.
In Asia, small earlier gains in the yen pressured Japanese
multinationals, with the Nikkei edging down 0.2% from a two-month
high.
--Giovanni Legorano contributed to this article.
Write to Riva Gold at riva.gold@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
May 22, 2018 15:36 ET (19:36 GMT)
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