Tech slide pulls S&P 500 down for its 5th straight loss

Wall Street capped a choppy day of trading Friday with another pullback for stocks and the S&P 500’s first weekly loss in three weeks.

The benchmark index fell 0.8 percent, its fifth straight decline, and ended 1.7 percent lower for the holiday-shortened week. That’s it’s biggest weekly drop since June. The other major U.S. stock indexes also posted weekly losses.

The selling was widespread, though technology, health care and communications stocks weighed most heavily on the S&P 500. Smaller company stocks also fell broadly. Treasury yields mostly rose. The price of U.S. crude oil rose 2.3 percent.

Stocks have traded in a narrow range for several weeks as most investors are sitting on the sidelines waiting to get a fuller understanding of where the economy is headed and how the pandemic is impacting corporations.

“There isn’t any new good news coming, and that’s important because we’ve gotten a decent amount of good news that has flowed up until this point this year,” said Liz Young, head of investment strategy at personal finance company SoFi.

The S&P 500 fell 34.70 points to 4,458.58. The index is now within 1.8 percent of the all-time high it set last week. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 271.66 points, or 0.8 percent, to 34,607.72. The tech-heavy Nasdaq composite shed an early gain, dropping 132.76 points, or 0.9 percent, to 15,115.49.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies gave up 21.58 points, or 1 percent, to 2,227.55.

Investors mulled a negative piece of inflation data Friday. Inflation at the wholesale level climbed 8.3 percent last month from August 2020, the biggest annual gain since the Labor Department started calculating the 12-month number in 2010.

Federal Reserve policymakers have said they believe inflation this year would be temporary and is a result of the economy recovering from the pandemic. However, persistently high inflation could force the Fed’s hand to start pulling back on its bond-buying program and low interest rate policy sooner than anticipated.

The bond market had a mild reaction to the inflation data, a possible sign that investors continue to agree with the Fed’s outlook. The yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 1.33 percent from 1.30 percent.