For the second day in a row a late fall has pushed Wall Street lower but unlike Tuesday, this time the market ended up in the red.
Tuesday saw Wall Street shed ground in the final half-hour or so but still end in the green – yesterday the market was mixed all day until the final hour when the sag reappeared and ended up pushing it deeper into losses – except for the tech ladened Nasdaq which ended the day with a small gain.
That, in turn, saw ASX 200 futures lose ground as well and a loss of close to 40 points was on the cards when trading re-opens later this morning, judging by the size of the fall just after 6 am.
US quarterly results didn’t give much help to sentiment.
The Dow fell 218.45 points, or 0.91%, to finish at 23,664.64. The S&P 500 shed 20.02 points, or 0.7%, to end at 2,848.42 and but the Nasdaq rose 45.27 points, or 0.51%, to close at 8,854.39, only 1.3% off for the year to date.
That was after Tuesday’s session when the Dow ended up 133.33 points, or 0.6%, to end at 24,883.09, the S&P 500 index rose 25.70 points to finish at 2,868.44, a gain of 0.9%, while the Nasdaq added 98.41 points, or 1.1%, to close at 8,809.12.
A mixture of factors hit sentiment besides weak results – the looming US jobs report for April and an expected 15 to 20 million people added to the unemployment pool, the slow re-opening of economies and US states, even though COVID-19 cases continue to rise, along with deaths and weaker commodity prices (helped in part by a rise on the day in the greenback.
The expected fall for the ASX 200 cones after the index retreated on Wednesday, down 0.4% or 22.5 points to 5384.
It was down 1.1% in the middle of the session.
The Aussie dollar eased to trade just over 64 US cents in early Asian dealings and the yield on the key US 10 year Treasury bond edged up to 0.709%, its highest for three weeks.
