Wall Street slides, but tech stocks help avert big loss

Most of Wall Street stumbled Thursday, but yet another rise for big technology stocks helped keep the market’s losses in check.

The S&P 500 dropped 12.22 points, or 0.4 percent, to 3,246.22, with nearly three out of four stocks in the index falling. Among the hardest-hit were oil producers, banks and other companies that most need the economy to pull out of its recession. Treasury yields also sank in a sign of increased pessimism about the economy.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 225.92 points, or 0.9 percent, to 26,313.65. Earlier in the morning, though, the market had seemed set for a much steeper fall. The Dow was down as many as 547 points, while the S&P 500 tumbled 1.7 percent within the first hour of trading.

Stronger-than-expected profit reports from UPS and other companies helped the market trim its losses through the day. So did steadying prices for Amazon and other big tech-oriented stocks, which reported their own results after the day’s trading ended. Anticipation for their reports, which proved to be even better than Wall Street expected, helped the Nasdaq composite completely erase its early loss and climb 44.87, or 0.4 percent, to end the day at 10,587.81.

The jumbled trading came after a report showed that layoffs are continuing at their stubborn pace across the country, denting hopes that the economy can recover nearly as quickly as it plummeted into recession. A separate report on Thursday showed that the U.S. economy contracted at a nearly 33 percent annual rate in the spring, the worst quarter on record.

Markets worldwide had already turned lower before those data releases dropped. An earlier report showed that Germany’s economy, Europe’s largest, suffered through its worst quarter on record during the spring.