S&P 500 up slightly; Dow slips

Wall Street closed Tuesday almost exactly where it began after a mixed set of profit reports led to a quiet, meandering day of trading.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index edged up by 3.55 points, or 0.1%, to 4,154.87 after drifting between small gains and losses throughout the day. The Dow Jones industrial average slipped 10.55 points, or less than 0.1%, to 33,976.63, while the Nasdaq composite was down 4.31 points, or less than 0.1%, at 12,153.41.

Lockheed Martin was one of Wall Street’s bigger gainers. It climbed 2.4% after reporting profit for the latest quarter that topped analysts’ expectations.

Bank of America rose 0.6% after its better-than-expected profit report led to an up-and-down day of trading. The majority of companies have been beating forecasts in the early days of this reporting season.

The bar, though, was low amid Wall Street’s worries about still-high inflation, much higher interest rates and slowing in some sections of the economy.

Healthcare stocks were broadly weak and the heaviest weight on the S&P 500 out of the 11 sectors that make up the index. Johnson & Johnson fell 2.8% despite reporting stronger profit than expected and raising its dividend.

Later this week, more reports will come from companies in the S&P 500. They include AT&T, Tesla and Procter & Gamble.

Wall Street’s attention will also turn to smaller, regional banks set to report, such as KeyCorp. and Zions Bancorp. Their stocks took a hit last month after the secondand third-largest U.S. bank failures in history.

The worry was that customers could pull all of their deposits out of banks at once, similar to the runs that toppled Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank.

“It appears that major bank earnings announcements helped soothe investors’ nervousness for financial stocks reporting in the upcoming days,” Stefano Pascale and other Barclays analysts said in a report. The Federal Reserve has jacked rates up at a furious pace over the last year in hopes of slowing high inflation. High rates can suffocate inflation, but also slow the entire economy, raising the risk of a recession and hurting investment prices.

Inflation is slowing, but traders widely expect the Fed to raise rates again at its next meeting in May.

Treasury yields have been climbing recently on such expectations, and they eased a bit Tuesday.

The 10-year yield fell to 3.57% from 3.61% late Monday. It helps set rates for mortgages and other important loans.

The two-year yield, which moves more on expectations for the Fed, slid to 4.19% from 4.21%.

Abroad, markets were mixed in Asia and modestly higher in Europe.