Tuesday started pretty good on Wall Street, but then things turned nasty. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 491.27 pts, or 1.56%, to close at 30,946.99. At one point, the Dow was up as much as 446.83 points, or 1.4%. It just goes to show how difficult it is to maintain a bear market rally.
The other major indexes fell more than the Dow on Mon. The broader S&P 500 index fell 2.01%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite retreated 2.98%. The small cap Russell 2000 dropped 1.86%.
Megacap tech stocks fell on Tue, including Apple (AAPL US, -2.98%), Microsoft (MSFT US, -3.17%) Amazon (AMZN US, -5.14%), Alphabet (GOOGL US, - 3.30%), Nvidia (NVDA US, -5.26%), and Meta Platforms (META US, -5.20%).
Qualcomm (QCOM US, +3.48%) shares climbed after a prominent analyst said Apple is likely to use the company’s 5G modems for its 2023 iPhones rather than relying on technology built in-house. Ming-Chi Kuo, an analyst at TF International Securities, wrote in a tweet, “My latest survey indicates that Apple’s own iPhone 5G modem chip development may have failed”.
Energy was the only S&P 500 sector that rose on Tue. The front-month Brent and WTI futures closed up $2.89 at US$117.98/bbl and $2.19 at US$111.76/bbl respectively. French President Emmanuel Macron was been caught telling US President Joe Biden on the sidelines of the G7 summit that the UAE and Saudi Arabia are close to capacity and cannot meaningfully increase oil production.
Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc (BRK/A US, -1.32%) said on Mon it has purchased another 794,389 shares of Occidental Petroleum Corp (OXY US, +4.77%), raising its holding to nearly 16.4%.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped 2.82 basis points (bps) to 3.1715%, while the yield on the 2-year Treasuries fell 1.16 bps to 3.1096%.
The ICE dollar index (DXY), which measures the strength of the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose 0.55% to 104.506 on Tue.
The most actively traded US gold futures (Aug) contracts settled down $3.60, or 0.2%, at US$1,821.20/oz. July silver, which is the most actively traded silver futures, fell 36.2 cents, or 1.7%, to end at US$20.806/oz.
European equity markets finished higher on Tue. The UK FTSE gained 0.9%, France's CAC 40 rose 0.64%, while the German DAX advanced 0.35%.