Investing.com – Wall Street traded lower on Monday with tech stocks leading the way down as investors remained concern over valuations and Apple was hit by another analyst downgrade.
At 11:39AM ET (15:39GMT), the Dow Jones fell 53 points, or 0.25%, the S&P 500 lost 6 points, or 0.25%, while the Nasdaq Composite traded down 34 points, or 0.55%.
Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) tumbled another 2% on Monday, adding to last Friday’s losses and leading the Dow lower, as the world’s most valuable publicly-listed firm received its second downgrade in a week.
Mizuho Securities cut its recommendation on Apple to hold from buy with a reduction in the target price by $10 to $150 as these analysts believe that the release of the iPhone 8 will not expand the user base.
The two-day correction to Apple’s shares, having soared 30% so far this year, spooked some investors who were worried about valuations of tech stocks that have also produced strong gains in 2017.
All of the closely followed tech stocks such as Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) Google parent Alphabet (NASDAQ:
GOOGL) Netflix (NASDAQ:NFLX), Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) or Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) continued the correction on Monday.
Limiting losses on the blue-chip index, General Electric (NYSE:GE) rose nearly 4% after the conglomerate announced that chairman and chief exec Jeff Immelt was stepping down and that John Flannery, current president and CEO of GE Healthcare, would be taking over as chief exec of the company, effective August 1 and then as chairman as well from January 1.
In a session with no major economic reports, investors await the start of the Fed’s two-day meeting on monetary policy with the central bank largely expected to hike rates on Wednesday.
Beyond the rate increase, market players will be watching to see if the Fed maintains plans to hike once more this year and for any indication on plans to normalize the balance sheet.
Meanwhile, oil prices rebounded on Monday, recovering from previous weekly losses of around 4% that were sparked by concerns over rising production in U.S. shale and from oil producers such as Libya and Nigeria that are exempt from output curbs in the OPEC agreement with non-OPEC members.
U.S. crude futures gained 0.49% to $47.63 by 11:55AM ET (15:55GMT), while Brent oil rose 0.22% to $49.58.