Wall Street ends mixed in uneven start for December

A day of wobbly trading on Wall Street ended Thursday with a mixed finish for stocks and bond yields broadly lower after the government reported that a measure of inflation that’s closely watched by the Federal Reserve eased in October.

The muted action came as traders looked ahead to a closely watched monthly report on the job market due out Friday that will show how the labor market is holding up and how that may influence what the Fed does next in its bid to cool inflation.

The S&P 500 closed 0.1% lower after drifting modestly higher and lower for much of the day. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 0.6% and the Nasdaq composite edged up 0.1%.

Banks and household goods providers were among the biggest drags on the benchmark S&P 500. Bank of America fell 2.9% and Costco slid 6.6%.

Gains in health care companies, communications services stocks and elsewhere in the market helped keep the losses in check. Drugmaker Pfizer rose 1.9% and Netflix climbed 3.7%.

Salesforce slumped 8.3% for the biggest drop in the S&P 500 after Bret Taylor said he would resign as co-CEO of the customer-management software developer.

Yields on both short-term and long-term bonds fell. The yield on the 10-year Treasury, which influences mortgage rates, edged lower to 3.51% from 3.61% late Wednesday. The yield on the two-year note, which tends to track market expectations of future Fed action, fell to 4.24%. from 4.33% a day earlier.

All told, the S& P 500 dipped 3.54 points to 4,076.57. The Dow dropped 194.76 points to 34,395.01. The Nasdaq rose 14.45 points to 11,482.45.

Major indexes are coming off of their second straight month of gains.

Markets rallied Wednesday after Fed Chair Jerome Powell indicated that the central bank could dial back the pace of its interest rate increases as soon as this month.