NEW YORK: Wall Street stocks retreated early Tuesday amid concerns over lofty equity valuations as markets digested a mostly solid set of corporate earnings.

Briefing.com analyst Patrick O’Hare listed seven larger companies whose earnings topped analyst forecasts, but noted that only two rose in pre-market trading.

Pointing to a recent uptick in bond yields, O’Hare observed that “a lot of good earnings news… has been priced into the market already.”

Wall St drops as investors cautious ahead of big earnings

About 25 minutes into trading, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.4 percent at 42,754.94.

The broad-based S&P 500 declined 0.4 percent to 5,830.83, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index shed 0.2 percent to 18,494.61.

Both the Dow and S&P 500 hit all-time highs last week.

The International Monetary Fund trimmed its 2024 and 2025 global growth forecast but said the US economy remained solid.

“I think for the US, we’re very close,” IMF Chief Economist Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas told AFP when asked if the Federal Reserve had successfully engineered a soft landing in which measures to address inflation limit price growth without causing a recession.

Among companies reporting results, General Motors soared 7.5 percent, while Verizon slumped 5.4 percent and GE Aerospace fell 6.7 percent.