Winners lose and losers win on Wall Street

Wall Street jostled to a mixed finish Tuesday, as former stalwarts ran out of momentum and some of the market’s most beatendown stocks turned into winners.

The S&P 500 slipped 0.5 percent after stocks that have held up the best through this year’s selloff fell to some of the market’s sharpest drops.

They included health care companies, big tech titans and winners of the stay-at-home economy, such as Netflix and Amazon.

Those are big companies, which give their movements outsized effect on the S&P 500. But nearly twice as many stocks rose in the index than fell.

Among the winners were travel companies, shopping mall owners and other businesses that got hammered after widespread stay-at-home orders locked away their customers.

Some U.S. states, including Texas, and nations around the world are gradually lifting restrictions implemented to slow the spread of the coronavirus outbreak.

All the washing around left the S&P 500 with a loss of 15.09 points to 2,863.39, its first in three days.

The index was up as much as 1.5 percent early in the morning before it quickly gave out, and the index spent much of the day flipping between small gains and losses.

It coincided with another wild day for oil prices, where a barrel of U.S. oil for delivery in June fell close to $10 before paring its losses, as swelling supplies continue to far exceed demand.

The fluctuations are a sign of a market still dominated by uncertainty about how the recession caused by the coronavirus outbreak will play out, said Tom Martin at Globalt Investments.

“The market is kind of biding its time, in a sense, and waiting to see what happens with regard to the virus itself,” he said. “Because the thing that matters the most to stocks is how much longer is this going to last. And sure, we can reopen, but how slow is that going to be? And even if it becomes more rapid, is there going to be a second wave” of infections?

Like the stocks within the market, the day’s leaderboard for U.S. indexes was close to a mirror opposite of their performance for the year so far.

The Nasdaq, which is dominated by big tech stocks and is the only major U.S. index up over the past year, fell 122.43, or 1.4 percent, to 8,607.73. The Russell 2000, which got beat up more than the rest of the market on worries about small companies’ financial strength, climbed 16.20, or 1.3 percent, to 1,298.08.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average slipped 32.23 points, or 0.1 percent, to 24,101.55.