Investing.com - Wall Street fell at the open Thursday and normally this type of drop would be cause for much more consternation. But given the tremendous rally the session before, it’s unsurprising some investors are locking in gains.
The Dow fell 1.5%, while the S&P 500 lost 1.46%. Both indexes rose nearly 5% yesterday.
The Nasdaq Composite fell 1.47% after jumping nearly 6% the day before.
"Such rallies are not uncommon in troubled times, and we have experienced many of them in past bear markets," said Hussein Sayed, chief market strategist at FXTM.
"To call for a bottom, we need at least a couple of days of strength, not just in price, but also in trading volume, breadth of the market, and fundamentally supported environment. Until we see a shift in fundamentals, it's challenging to build on a single-day rally."
Traders and investors also said technical market factors contributed to Wednesday's rally as the S&P was its most oversold in years by some technical measures.
The FAANG stocks, which all gained more than 5% Wednesday, started in the red.
Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) lost 1%, Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX) slipped 1.3% and Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) was down 1.8%.
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), which soared more than 9% yesterday on encouraging retail numbers, dropped 1%.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock fell 1.2% as Reuters reported that the company will begin assembling its top-end iPhones in India through the local unit of Foxconn as early as 2019.
In financials, JP Morgan Chase (NYSE:JPM) lost 1.7% after the company agreed to pay $135 million to settle claims that it improperly handled transactions of American Depositary Receipts.
And Visa (NYSE:V) fell 2,2% after the company said it would acquire British payments firm Earthport for about $250 million.
On the economic front initial jobless claims fell unexpectedly, but not by much. Claims for first-time unemployment benefits fell by 1,000 to 216,000.
-- Reuters contributed to this report.