thu APRIL 13, 2018 / 6:34 pm
Wall Street falls as bank stocks, Syria conflict weigh
DJ: 24,360.14 -122.91 ` NAS: 7,106.65 -33.60 S&P: 2,656.30
-7.69 4/13
NEW YORK (Reuters) -
Financial stocks led a drop on Wall Street on Friday as results from big banks
failed to enthuse and fear of broader conflict in Syria further unnerved
investors. The S&P banks index fell
2.6 percent and the broader S&P financial index lost 1.6 percent, the most
among the 11 major S&P sectors.
Shares of JPMorgan
Chase & Co, the biggest U.S. bank by assets, dropped 2.7 percent
after the bank’s quarterly
profit fell slightly short of expectations. JPMorgan shares were the
biggest weight on the S&P 500.
Wells Fargo sank 3.4 percent after the bank said it
may have to pay a penalty
of $1 billion to resolve investigations, while Citigroup dropped 1.6 percent despite beating
profit estimates. Weak loan growth weighed on bank shares,
said RJ Grant, head of trading at Keefe, Bruyette & Woods in New York. “If you didn’t own financials going into the
quarter, there was nothing in the numbers today that would make you excited
about owning them,” Grant said.
U.S. stocks extended
losses on Friday after the State Department said that it had proof that Syria
carried out a recent chemical weapons attack in the town of Douma. The
renewed possibility of a
strike in Syria “is enough to cause heartburn for the market,” said Robert
Phipps, a director at Per Stirling Capital Management in Austin, Texas.
“There’s a ton of uncertainty right now so investors don’t want to go into the
weekend particularly long.”
The Dow Jones Industrial
Average fell 122.91 points, or 0.5 percent, to 24,360.14, the S&P 500 lost
7.69 points, or 0.29 percent, to 2,656.3 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 33.60
points, or 0.47 percent, to 7,106.65. Still, for the week,
the S&P 500 rose 1.99 percent, the Dow gained 1.79 percent, and the Nasdaq
added 2.77 percent.
Friday’s bank results
kicked off earnings season,
with Thomson Reuters data predicting
profits at S&P 500 companies increased by 18.6 percent in the first quarter
from a year ago, their biggest rise in seven years. While the U.S. economy is performing well,
geopolitical issues are weighing on stock markets this year.
Senior Russian lawmakers said on Friday that the lower house of
parliament would consider draft legislation giving the Kremlin powers to ban or
restrict a list of U.S. imports, reacting to new U.S. sanctions on Russian
tycoons and officials. Boeing fell 2.4 percent after a
Russian lawmaker said the country may stop supplying titanium to the
company. Issues with engines for
Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner planes also weighed on the company’s shares.
The top gainer among
S&P sectors was energy, up 1.1 percent as oil prices rose.
Tesla rose 2.1 percent after founder
Elon Musk said the electric car maker would be profitable in the third
and fourth quarters and would not need to raise any money this year.
Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a
1.28-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.64-to-1 ratio favored decliners.
Volume on U.S. exchanges
was 5.78 billion shares,
compared to the 7.22 billion average for the full session over the last 20
trading days.
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