Wall Street was lower in early afternoon trading on Friday as investors assess valuations after a three-day rally spurred by optimism that the Federal Reserve will hold off from raising interest rates in the near term. Some analysts have been questioning valuations as corporate earnings continued to be tepid. The S&P 500 is trading 17.4 times expected earnings, above its 10-year average of 14.7, according to Starmine.
"The market is taking a bit of a breather after a strong week," said Mike Bailey, director of research at FBB Capital Partner, in Bethesda, Maryland. The S&P 500 index notched its best two-day performance in more than two months on Thursday and is up about 1.5 percent this week.
At 12:40 pm ET (GMT) the Dow Jones industrial average was down 70.1 points, or 0.38 percent, at 18,322.36, the S&P 500 was down 6.78 points, or 0.31 percent, at 2,170.4 and the Nasdaq Composite was down 15.59 points, or 0.29 percent, at 5,323.93. Eight of the 11 major S&P sectors were lower, with the energy index's 1.23 percent fall leading the decliners.
Twitter shares jumped as much as 23 percent to $22.89, posting its biggest one-day percentage gain since its market debut in 2013, after sources said the microblogger has initiated talks to explore a sale. CNBC earlier reported suitors for Twitter could include Alphabet's Google and Salesforce.com. Salesforce was down 5.1 percent at $70.77 and Alphabet was little changed at $815.86.
Facebook was down 1.3 percent at $128.41 after the WSJ reported the social media giant overestimated viewing time for video ads by 60-80 percent for two years. Bats Global Markets jumped 21 percent to $32.10, a day after Bloomberg reported CBOE Holdings is in talks to buy the stock exchange. CBOE was up 1.5 percent at $70.47.