The main benchmarks fell on Thursday as traders became cautious ahead of a key employment report due on Friday.
At the close in New York, the S&P 500 (INDEXSP:.INX) was down two points at 2,100 and the Nasdaq Composite was 14 points in the hole at 5,128, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average (INDEXDJX:.DJI) was down five at 17,863.
The non-farm payrolls report comes out on the first Friday of each month and so is due tomorrow.
On the corporate front, shares in social media giant Facebook’s (NASDAQ:FB) were heavily traded.
The operator of the current generation's largest thief-of-time pushed out a quarterly results statement that contained another significant yardstick as the site passed the one billion mark for daily active users (DAU).
Tallying DAUs at 1.01bn in the month of September it represents a 17% increase year-on-year, and perhaps telling of the trend towards smart phones and tablets the figure for mobile DAU’s amounted to 894mln.
Facebook shares were up 5.3% at US$109.18.
Elsewhere in the tech sector, trading in wireless chip technology outfit Qualcomm's (NASDAQ:QCOM) shares was also frenetic, with the majority of the trades being sells, judging by the near 14% slide in the share price to US$51.90.
The company issued a weak outlook statement last night that completely overshadowed better-than-expected third quarter numbers.
The best performing blue chip is high-fashion firm Ralph Lauren (NYSE:RL), up 16.4% at US$132.25.
There was a bit of sniffiness about the recent appointment of Stefan Larsson as the new chief executive given his background in main street retailers, but the former boss of Old Navy has got off to a good start with quarterly earnings ahead of expectations.
Adjusted earnings per share (EPS) slipped to US$2.13 from US$2.25 a year earlier, comfortably ahead of the US$1.74 analysts had been expecting. Reported EPS, which includes one-off items, fell to US$1.86.
Another retailer, Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ:WFM), was faring less well after last night's update revealed like-for-like sales were down 0.2% from a year earlier in the quarter ended 27 September.
Earnings of US$1.48 per share on revenue of US$15.39bn for the full year missed estimates of earnings of US$1.67 per share on US$15.42bn in revenue.
The shares declined 2.7% to US$29.91, though they are comfortably off their intra-day low.
Expedia (NASDAQ:EXPE) rose 3.6% to US$139.03, a day after the world's largest online travel agency by bookings agreed to buy vacation rental site HomeAway (NASDAQ:AWAY) for about US$3.9bn in cash and stock. HomeAway shares took off, surging 24.4% to US$39.85.