Stock Market Today: Dow ends lower, S&P 500 snaps 8-day winning streak as comeback rally pauses (2024)

Tuesday's Top Reads

U.S. stock indexes finished lower on Tuesday as the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite snapped a multisession rally after equities bounced back from a steep selloff earlier this month.

Markets will turn their attention to Wednesday's release of payroll revisions and the Federal Open Market Committee's July meeting minutes, followed by jobless claims on Thursday and Chair Jerome Powell's remarks at Jackson Hole Economic Symposium on Friday.

Consumers have kept spending, but with a focus on getting the biggest bang for their buck.

Similar thrifty vibes have been gripping Wall Street, helping lift the S&P 500’s equal-weighted index to record levels.

“It’s telling you the rally is broadening out,” said Robert Pavlik, a senior portfolio manager at Dakota Wealth Management. After a big rally in the “Magnificent Seven” tech stocks earlier this year, investors appear to be hunting for bargains in other areas of the market, he noted.

Treasury yields finished broadly lower as traders focused on the possibility of a downward revision to the government's annual payrolls figure on Wednesday.

The 30-year rate fell 4.5 basis points to 4.07%, the lowest closing level since Jan. 3.

U.S. stock indexes were lower in the final hour of trading on Tuesday, threatening their long winning streak following the brutal selloff in early August.

The S&P 500 was down 0.2%, pressured by energy stocks. The S&P 500's energy sector was losing 2.1%, on pace for its worst day since Aug. 5.

Shares of Valero Energy Corp. were tumbling 3.5%, while Marathon Petroleum Corp.'s stock was off 3.4%, according to FactSet data.

Both the large-cap benchmark S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite were on track to snap their eight-session winning streaks, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Here's a look at where the three major stock indexes stood in Tuesday's late-afternoon session:

Stocks have been on a volatile ride this month, with the S&P 500 bursting back from its early August slump with more sharp moves higher than any month since last year, according to independent research firm CappThesis.

Monday marked the S&P 500’s fifth daily gain of at least 1% so far in August, the most for a calendar month since June 2023, said Frank Cappelleri, founder of CappThesis, in a note Tuesday.

The S&P 500’s recent cluster of “big moves” emerged in a bounce from its early August selloff, with positive breadth in eight out of the 10 trading days since Aug. 6, according to CappThesis. While megacap growth stocks led gains, they had “plenty of company this time,” said Cappelleri.

The steep rebound for the S&P 500 has brought the U.S.-large-cap stock index to positive territory for August, after fresh economic data reduced investor anxieties that had surfaced early this month over a softening labor market. For example, the Department of Commerce last week released a report on U.S. retail sales in July that was stronger than Wall Street expected.

Oil futures logged a loss Tuesday for a third straight session, pulling prices for U.S. and global benchmark crude futures to their lowest settlement in two weeks.

While economic data has been limited so far this week, “risk-on money flows have begun to ebb amid simmering demand worries linked to threat of a global recession,” Tyler Richey, co-editor at Sevens Report Research, told MarketWatch. And the “more risk-off mood” on Wall Street Tuesday spilled Nymex trading with all major energy futures contracts in the red.

September West Texas Intermediate crude, which expired at the end of the trading session, settled at $74.04 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange, down 33 cents, or 0.4%. The October contract, which is now the front month, lost 49 cents, or 0.7%, to end at $73.17. October Brent crude, the global benchmark lost 46 cents, or 0.6%, to $77.20 on ICE Futures Europe.

Investors might pay more attention than usual to the minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s July meeting, which will be released at 2 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, noted Quincy Krosby, chief global strategist for LPL Financial.

While the Fed's minutes usually do not have much impact on markets, they could spell danger for stocks if investors pick up anything in them that suggests Fed officials do not believe an interest-rate cut is needed at the central bank's meeting next month, Krosby said in a call.

Brent Schutte, chief investment officer at Northwestern Mutual Wealth Management Co., added that while there seems to be a consensus that rate cuts are likely to begin soon, “we will watch to see if there was discussion about the possible size and cadence of future rate cuts.”

U.S. stock indexes were giving back some of their earlier losses in afternoon trading on Tuesday.

The S&P 500 was flat, trading at 5,608 as of 2:30 p.m. Eastern time. If the large-cap benchmark index closes in the green, it would mark its ninth straight session advance and its longest winning streak in nearly 20 years, according to Dow Jones Market Data.

Shares of Palo Alto Networks Inc. were up 8.9% after the company delivered an upbeat earnings report on Monday afternoon. It was the best performer on the S&P 500 on Tuesday, according to FactSet data.

The Dow and the Nasdaq Composite were also struggling for direction on Tuesday afternoon.

There’s something “weird” about the U.S. dollar’s slide versus major rivals this month, according to one Wall Street strategist, and he suspects it might be explained by the sudden shift in the U.S. presidential race.

“That the USD (U.S. dollar) has weakened since early August is a bit weird, in our view, as it has come during a period in which the U.S. data (retail sales, initial claims, services ISM) has pointed to renewed relative strength in the U.S., following the worries about a lapse into recession during late July and early August,” Thierry Wizman, global FX and rates strategist at Macquarie, said in a Tuesday note.

“But we think that the rising prospect of a Democratic victory in the presidential race might explain the weakness in the USD since late July,” he wrote.

That’s because Trump’s policy proposals, including expanded tariffs and immigration restrictions, are seen as potentially more inflationary than those outlined by Harris, Wizman argued. In turn, that would mean the Federal Reserve would need to keep interest rates higher than would otherwise be the case, lending support to the currency.

The ICE U.S. Dollar Index DXY, a measure of the currency against a basket of six major rivals, is down 2.4% so far in August, trading near its lows from early January.

The S&P 500 was off 0.2% on Tuesday early afternoon, on track to end its eight-day winning streak as stocks struggled to build on the market's recent comeback rally.

The S&P 500's energy sector was the worst-performing sector among the large-cap benchmark index's 11 sectors, down 2.4%. The S&P 500's consumer staples, health care and communication services sectors were the only three corners trading in the green as of 1:45 p.m. Eastern time on Tuesday, according to FactSet data.

Sharing of Boeing were tumbling over 4%, weighing on the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500. The aircraft company has temporarily grounded its 777x test fleet after test flights and routine inspections showed failures in a portion of a structure that mounts the engine to the aircraft.