Key insights
- US stocks are mixed with Nasdaq under pressure due to chip stock declines. The 30-year Treasury yield rising above 5% is a potential headwind for equities. Defensive sectors like healthcare and staples are outperforming. The VIX is unusually down despite the stock market decline, and the dollar index is firmer.
US stocks (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC) are mixed ahead of Tuesday's market close as the Nasdaq Composite drops by over 1%, pushed lower by declines in chip stocks.
Yahoo Finance Markets and Data Editor Jared Blikre takes a closer look at the market reaction to the April Consumer Price Index (CPI) report released this morning.
We can see a little bit of green for the Dow, but don't get too excited. Tech is taking a little bit of a bath here. You can see the Dow has been in red territory the whole day, except for very recently, and we're only talking about 70 points to the upside. Meanwhile, Nasdaq is down at 1 and a quarter percent, S&P 500 down 4/10ths of a percent. Never seen any green for either of those indices today. Small caps, very similar story, Russell 2000 down about 1 and a third percent.
I'm watching the bond market that we'll get to chips too. I'm watching the bond market here. Let's get to uh oh, there we go. Here's the 30-year T bond yield. That is up to 5.03%. I've been watching this very carefully. 5% is that level that tends to give stocks a little bit of trouble sometimes. It might be explaining it in perhaps what's uh in small part what's going on today. So 30-year T bond yield above 5%, the 10-year is up six basis points to 4.47% and I showed the VIX a second ago. This is another thing I've been watching.
Really interesting. Traders, they love to buy the dip, right? Well, for whatever reason, the VIX is actually down. Uh usually you see that uh going up when stocks are down, but a Topsy Turvy world, here we are. Uh US Dollar Index also firmer. Uh the DXY up about 1/3 of 1%.
Now checking out the large cap sector action, we've got a lot of defensiveness uh in the green sector. So healthcare, that's up 2%. That's a nice gain there. But again, that's kind of defensive. Staples, that's another defensive group up 1.7%. Energy, sometimes defensive, that's up uh 1%. Financials are not defensive, but they're still up 1%. And then utilities and real estate, both of those are fi uh both of those are a bit defensive.
Now, tech is what I've been watching here. The XLK is down about two and a third percent. Consumer discretionary, which houses Amazon and Tesla, that's down 1%. I'll show you what that's looking like right here. You can see kind of a mixed board. You do have some green. Walmart's up 2%, but that's a staples trade. Nvidia one of the
few chip stocks in the green today. Let me just slide over to our semiconductor board. You can see a whole lot of dark red here. Very similar story for software. You can see a lot of red in there, but we see a little bit more green inside the Dow. You see, I talked about Walmart. We see JP Morgan up about 2%, J&J one and three quarters, Merk up one and two thirds, Coca-Cola up two, United Health two and three quarters. So we are seeing a little bit of strength here, but those defensive sectors not going to carry the whole load.
You can't expect tech to go up every single day though, can you?
All right, Jared, thank you.