Stocks are mixed ahead of earnings reports
NEW YORK — Stocks swerved to a mixed finish Monday on Wall Street, ahead of a deluge of corporate earnings reports scheduled to arrive this week.
The S&P 500 rose 13.89 points, or 0.4 percent, to 3,855.36 as gains for influential Big Tech stocks were big enough to steady the index and return it to a record. It recovered from a 1.2 percent loss earlier in the day, as investors expect Apple and other tech giants to report healthy profits for the end of 2020 in coming days.
Other areas of the market were softer, though, and the majority of stocks on Wall Street fell amid concerns about the still-raging pandemic, delayed COVID-19 vaccine rollouts in some places and Washington’s ability to deliver stimulus to blunt economic pain.
The Dow Jones Industrial
Average dipped 36.98, or 0.1 percent, to 30,960.00. The Nasdaq composite, which is packed with tech stocks, rose 92.93, or 0.7 percent, to 13,635.99 and another record.
The Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks fell 5.49, or 0.3 percent, to 2,163.27. The yield on the 10-year Treasury sank to 1.03 percent from 1.07 percent late Friday.
Besides Apple, more than 100 companies in the S&P 500 are scheduled to tell investors this week how they fared during the last three months of 2020. They include American Express, Johnson & Johnson, 3M, AT&T and Tesla.
“We’ve had a sprint higher for about four weeks now, and there’s a lot coming this week,” said Brad Peterson, national portfolio adviser at Northern Trust Wealth Management. “Today’s action is probably just a pause.”
Through the earliest parts of this earnings reporting season, companies have largely been clearing the very low bar of expectations Wall Street had set for them. As a whole, analysts expect S&P 500 companies to say their fourth quarter profit fell 5 percent from a year earlier. That’s a milder drop than the 9.4 percent they were forecasting earlier this month, according to FactSet.
Kimberly-Clark, the maker of Huggies and Kleenex, was the latest big company to report better profit than analysts expected, and its stock rose 3.3 percent Monday.
Markets have been mostly rallying recently on hopes that COVID-19 vaccines will lead to a powerful economic recovery this year as daily life gets closer to normal. Hopes are also high that Washington will deliver another dose of stimulus for the economy now that the White House and both houses of Congress are under single control of the Democrats.