Volatile day ends with stocks little changed

Another erratic day of trading Thursday on Wall Street ended with an uneven finish for the major stock indexes, after the market reversed most of an early slide in the final hour of trading.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index closed only 0.1% lower after having been down 1.9% earlier in the day. The Dow Jones industrial average fell 0.3%, while the Nasdaq composite rose 0.1%.

Trading has been volatile, with indexes prone to sharp swings from one day to the next, or within a single day, as investors try to shield their portfolios from the effects of the highest inflation in decades and rising interest rates as the Federal Reserve moves to tame surging prices.

Another dire readout on inflation sparked a wave of selling early Thursday, with technology stocks weighing down the S&P 500 index the most. The sector made solid gains during the pandemic amid a broad shift to working and shopping from home, but it has seen sharp declines as inf lation worsens and interest rates head higher. Apple and chipmaker Nvidia each fell 2.7%, while Microsoft dropped 2%.

“The pullback in growth stocks, tech in particular, has been dramatic,” said Brian Price, head of investment management at Commonwealth Financial Network. “We have a reckoning, if you will, that maybe we did go too far too fast” with many of those stocks.

The S&P 500 fell 5.10 points to 3,930.08. The Dow dropped 103.81 points to 31,730.30. The Nasdaq rose 6.73 points to 11,370.96. The indexes are all on pace for sharp weekly declines, extending the market’s slump this year. The benchmark S&P 500 is now down 17.5% this year, while the Nasdaq is down 27.3%.

Smaller-company stocks held up far better than the rest of the market. The Russell 2000 rose 21.24 points, or 1.2%, to 1,739.38.

The yield on the 10-year Treasury fell to 2.87% from 2.92%.

The Labor Department on Thursday reported that wholesale prices soared 11% in April from a year earlier. Many of those higher costs are being passed on to consumers.