Big Tech stocks drag Wall Street mostly lower

Stocks closed mostly lower on Wall Street Monday, dragged down by losses in several Big Tech companies.

The S&P 500 gave up 0.8%, its fifth straight decline. The tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 2.5%, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average eked out a gain of just under 0.1%.

Concerns that inflation could come back have helped send Treasury yields to their highest level in a year. The yield on the 10-year Treasury nudged up to 1.36% and crude oil prices jumped another 3.8%.

Investors remain focused on the future of global economies badly hit by COVID-19 and the potential for more stimulus to fix them. The U.S. House of Representatives is likely to vote on President Joe Biden’s proposed stimulus package by the end of the week. It would include $1,400 checks to most Americans, additional payments for children, and billions of dollars in aid to state and local governments as well as additional aid to businesses impacted by the pandemic.

But the large amount of stimulus being pumped into the economy has given some investors pause as inflation worries reentered the market after being nonexistent for more than a decade.

“There are some risks out there,” said Gary Schlossberg, global strategist at Wells Fargo Investment Institute. “The issue is are we just normalizing back to where we were before the pandemic or are we talking about a sea change.”

The yield on the 10-year Treasury rose to 1.36% from 1.34% late Friday and has been rising steadily throughout the year. The higher yields have helped lift banks, which rely on higher yields to charge more lucrative interest on loans.

There was a lot of churn within different sectors just behind the broader market losses. The S&P 500 was just about evenly split between winners and losers.

Technology stocks accounted for a big share of the selling. The sector, which powered much of the market’s gains in 2020, is on pace for a fifth straight loss. That pullback helped drag down the Nasdaq, while the Dow, which isn’t as heavily weighted with tech stocks, rose.