Wall Street benchmarks struggled for direction ahead of the trading close on Tuesday, with corporate earnings for the third quarter being the main focus for investors.
The Dow Jones (INDEXDJX:.DJI) fluctuated and was last up less than 0.1% at 17,234 while the S&P 500 (INDEXSP:.INX) slid less than 0.1% to 2,031 and the Nasdaq Composite (INDEXNASDAQ:.IXIC) tumbled 0.5% to 4,882.
Today's financial results were very much in different lanes. The likes of IBM (NYSE:IBM), Harley Davidson (NYSE:HOG) and Regions Financial (NYSE:RF) all fell short of market expectations, whereas Verizon (NYSE:VZ), Travelers (NYSE:TRV), United Technologies (NYSE:UTX) and Six Flags (NYSE:SIX) did better than Wall Street expected.
Fast-food franchiser YUM Brands (NYSE:YUM) advanced over 2% ahead of the closing, after the KFC and Pizza Hut parent revealed plans to spin-out its Chinese arm.
United Continental Holdings (NYSE:UAL) slipped 1.8% to $55.73. The owner of United Airlines confirmed executive vice president and general counsel Brett Hart as acting chief executive in the place of Oscar Munoz, who suffered a heart attack earlier this month.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), up 1.8% at US$113.75, said it had signed up over 6.5mln subscribers to its music streaming service and a further 8.5mln users were currently using it via a three month free trial period.
Memory maker SanDisk (NASDAQ:SNDK) was up around 5% amid bid speculation with Western Digital (NASDAQ:WDC) in the frame as a possible buyer, according to reports, which claim WD is in advanced talks.
Elsewhere, the day’s other takeover story involved physician services outsourcer AmSurg (NASDAQ:AMSG) which is said to be seeking a merger with TeamHealth Holdings (NYSE:TMH).
The former is down 3.3% to US$75,56 per share, whereas the latter rose nearly 18% to trade at US$61.66.
Later this afternoon, after the closing bell, the attention will be on Chipotle (NYSE:CMG) and Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) as both will be releasing third quarter earnings reports.