US shares checked their falls but still ended lower on Tuesday as the fallout from US plans to ban travellers from selected Muslim-majority nations continued and looked like becoming a bigger issue than the Mexican Wall controversy.
The Dow hit 20,000 for the first time on January 25 -- and many investors attributed this milestone to continued optimism about the new presidency of Donald Trump.
Barely a week later, with Trump having started to focus more on protectionist policies and less on econonomic stimulus and tax reform, a sense of unease is starting to creep in on Wall Street.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average, which earlier shed as much as 160 points intraday, ended 105 points, or 0.5%, lower at 19,865, while the Nasdaq Composite barely rebounded – the only majors ticker to do so – at the very last moment, crossed the path of ending up 0.02% at 5614 – propelled by optimistic expectations over Wall Street’s largest-listed stock Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) which was reporting after the bell.
The S&P 500 market bellwether closed down 0.09% at 2278 and led by retailer Under Armour (NYSE:UAA) down 25.8% at $21.48. The company’s Class C shares (NYSE:UA) took second place, down 23.4% to $19.23 after a bad Q4 miss.
Given the scale and pace of gains since the November election of Donald Trump, it didn’t take much to hit a new record on the flipside. The broad gauge of US equities fell on Tuesday for the fourth day in a row, marking the longest stretch of losses since before the election in the latest sign of pressure on the Trump rally trade.
Natural resources were also a major play with the S&P 500 Materials sector underperforming, down 0.6% to 326. But the price of copper moved towards $6,000 a tonne as traders bet that workers at the world’s biggest copper mine Escondida in Chile would reject a pay deal and go on strike.
On the month, the S&P 500 was still up 18 points for January, but it was a token victory.
Copper for three-month delivery on the London Metal Exchange advanced $138 to $5,989 a tonne amid claims from union representatives that miners were voting against the offer made by Escondida’s owner BHP Billiton.
Elsewhere, Federal Reserve kicked off its first of two days’ deliberation over whether to hike US interest rates albeit no change is expected so soon after their previous in December and it was almost a sideshow to other events.
But the S&P Midcap 400 managed to better the Nasdaq, also rising from doldrums earlier in the day to close up 0.3% at 1687 and led by Netscout Systems (NASDAQ:NTCT), up 5.9% to $33.30 after third quarter earnings.
The S&P Smallcap 600 crawled along little changed all session and ended up a healthy 0.9% at 834 and led by Momenta Pharma (NASDAQ:MNTA) up 24.8% to $18.85 after the company announced that the United States District Court for the District of Delaware has found each of Teva Pharmaceutical's (NYSE:TEVA) U.S. Patent Nos. 8,232,250; 8,399,413; 8,969,302; and 9,155,776 invalid. Teva’s ADRs ended down 3.2% at $33.43.
Meanwhile, Toronto's TSX Composite closed the session down 0.1% at 15,385.
After the bell, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) will report. As at 1622 ET, the details were not available and the share price jumped erratically.