NEW YORK: The Dow led declines among US stock indexes on Tuesday after quarterly updates from Goldman Sachs and Johnson & Johnson stoked investor worries about the outlook for corporate earnings amid concerns of a recession.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc dropped 2% after its quarterly profit fell 19%, hit by sluggish dealmaking and losses from the sale of some loans from its consumer unit Marcus.
Bank of America Corp slipped 1.1% in choppy trade even as its first-quarter profit beat analysts’ estimate. The wider banking index was down 0.3%.
Strong results from big banks including JPMorgan Chase & Co last week had fueled optimism about resilience in the banking sector following a turmoil in March sparked by the collapse of some mid-sized US lenders.
“All in all, bank earnings were phenomenal. Goldman Sachs is an investment banking and trading company. It’s a different business and that was reflected in the top line today,” said Thomas Hayes, chairman at Great Hill Capital LLC.
S&P 500 company earnings are expected to decline 4.8% in the first quarter from a year earlier, according to Refinitiv IBES data, a slight improvement from the 5.2% decline forecast last week.
“We came into earnings season with very low expectations, and as we move through the earnings season, we’re going to find that negative 6.3% was a very low bar and many companies are able to step over that type of bar with ease,” Hayes said.
The CBOE Volatility index, also known as Wall Street’s fear gauge, edged up to 16.96 after hitting an over one-year low earlier.
Wall Street’s main indexes are trading near two-month highs after mixed economic data recently supported bets the Fed will hike interest rates by 25 basis points in May and hit pause before cutting rates in the second half of the year.
Atlanta President Raphael Bostic in an interview said that the US central bank has one more rate hike ahead of it, while St. Louis President James Bullard stressed on the need for continued rate increases with recent data indicating sticky inflation.
At 11:43 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 93.78 points, or 0.28%, at 33,893.40, the S&P 500 was down 5.63 points, or 0.14%, at 4,145.69, and the Nasdaq Composite was down 20.48 points, or 0.17%, at 12,137.24.
Johnson & Johnson fell 2.5% as the healthcare conglomerate issued a conservative 2023 profit forecast.
Nvidia Corp jumped 2.9% after HSBC upgraded the chipmaker’s stock to “buy” from “reduce”, surprised by its pricing power on artificial intelligence (AI) chips.
Investors will monitor quarterly earnings from Netflix Inc after market hours.
Lockheed Martin Corp rose 2.5% after quarterly results of the US weapons maker’s surpassed Wall Street targets as simmering geopolitical tensions fueled demand from both domestic and international customers.
Declining issues outnumbered advancers by a 1.23-to-1 ratio on the NYSE and a 1.43-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.
The S&P index recorded 25 new 52-week highs, while the Nasdaq recorded 51 new highs and 79 new lows.
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