Bumpy day sends stocks mostly down; bond yields drop

A choppy day on Wall Street ended with stocks mostly lower Friday, helping push the S&P 500 to its second straight weekly loss.

Investors continued to watch the bond market, where Treasury yields eased lower, as well as Washington, where Congress is expected to vote on President Joe Biden’s stimulus package.

Losses in banks and health care stocks Friday helped drag the S&P 500 down 0.5 percent, erasing an early gain. Falling oil prices weighed on energy stocks. Technology and communication services companies, which bore the brunt of selling a day before, recovered slightly, which helped the tech-heavy Nasdaq composite manage a 0.6 percent gain.

Bond yields eased off their multiweek climb. The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury fell to 1.42 percent from 1.51 percent. late Thursday.

“We still think the uptrend in (stocks) is very much intact and that they’ll outperform bonds in the coming year,” said Sameer Samana, senior global market strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute.

The S&P 500 index fell 18.19 points to 3,811.15. Despite a twoweek slide, the index managed a 2.6 percent gain for February after a 1.1 percent loss in January.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 469.64 points, or 1.5 percent, to 30,932.37. The Nasdaq rose 72.91 points to 13,192.34, but it still posted its biggest weekly loss since October.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies eked out a small gain, adding 0.88 points, or less than 0.1 percent, to close at 2,201.05.

The indexes remain close to the all-time highs they set earlier this month.

A sell-off on Wall Street on Thursday picked up speed when the yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note rose above 1.5 percent, a level not seen in more than a year and far above the 0.92 percent it was trading at only two months ago. That move raised the alarm that yields, and the interest rates they influence, will move higher from here.

The recent rise in bond yields reflects growing confidence that the economy is on the path to recovery but also expectations that inflation is headed higher, which might prompt central banks eventually to raise interest rates to cool price increases. Rising yields can make stocks look less attractive relative to bonds, which is why every tick up in yields has corresponded with a tick down in stock prices.