On sluggish day, tech stocks shine

Apple, Intel and several chip makers jump more than 2%.

— Tech stocks were NEW YORK the standouts in an otherwise sluggish day of trading on Monday, as investors gear up for the arrival of the heart of earnings reporting season.

Apple, Intel and several chip makers jumped more than 2%, and technology stocks in the S&P 500 climbed 1.2%. But the other 10 sectors that make up the index were evenly split between gainers and losers, and none moved by more than 0.5%.

All the mixed trading left the S&P 500 up 8.42 points, or 0.3%, at 2,985.03. The index is back within 1% of its record, which was set a week earlier.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged up 17.70, or 0.1%, to 21,171.90, and the Nasdaq composite rose 57.65, or 0.7%, to 8,204.14.

More action may arrive in the next two weeks, when a tidal wave of earnings reports is on the schedule. Roughly three-fifths of S&P 500 companies are set to update investors on how much profit they made from April through June, and expectations are generally low.

A slowing global economy and rising costs are weighing on companies, and many investors are more interested in what CEOs say about how President Donald Trump’s trade war will affect their future profits than in their results for the spring.

The last couple earnings reporting seasons have been so volatile for stocks that Craig Hodges, portfolio manager at Hodges Funds, said he’s recently raised how much cash he’s holding in anticipation of bargain-hunting opportunities. Particularly among small stocks that don’t get as much attention from Wall Street, Hodges said he’s seen steep, overdone drops in price following earnings reports.

“We’re sitting on cash right now, knowing that in the next few weeks, there will be a lot of stocks that we like that get hit by 10, 15 or maybe even 20% if they have a miss,” he said. “We’re not market timers, but after seeing the last two earnings periods, we wished we had a cash balance to take advantage of some of the names that we liked that got hit.”

So far this reporting season, which is still in its early going, stocks have dropped a bit more than usual when a company falls short of Wall Street’s earnings expectations. Among the 16% of big S&P 500 companies that have already reported their second-quarter results, the average decline has been 2.7% following an earnings miss, slightly more than the 2.6% average over the last five years, according to FactSet.

On the winning end Monday was Halliburton, which reported a bigger profit than Wall Street expected.