The stock market is giving me whiplash.
The Nasdaq Composite has already cut its sharp 1% decline in half. The S&P 500 is only down 0.1%. The Dow is up 40 points, or 0.1%.
Some traders opted to sell highflying tech stocks like Palantir and Nvidia shortly after the open. The move looks like an attempt to take profits ahead of a potentially risky stretch of earnings reports beginning with Tesla and Alphabet after tomorrow’s close. At least some on Wall Street saw that as a chance to buy the dip.
Roughly 384 stocks in the S&P 500 are rising—meaning the index is falling despite strong breadth. If every stock in the index weighed the same, it would be up about 0.8% based on the gain in the Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF.
The S&P’s biggest losers, though, weren’t tech, but stocks that reported results this morning like General Motors, Philip Morris International, and Lockheed Martin.
At the sector level, however, tech was lagging the pack with a 0.9% drop. S&P 500 materials stocks were down 0.1%. The other nine major sectors were on the rise, led by healthcare’s 1.4% gain. Real estate and utilities were up 0.9% and 0.6%, respectively.