By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened mixed on Tuesday as the good mood music created by U.S.-China trade talks and falling numbers of coronavirus cases in the U.S. was drowned out by the sound of an approaching hurricane and some ugly-looking consumer sentiment numbers
Hurricane Laura, upgraded overnight from Tropical Storm designation by the National Hurricane Center, is set to make landfall by Wednesday evening, and is set to disrupt the operations of major oil refineries in east Texas and Louisiana, some of which have already been shut as a precaution. So far, however, it appears unlikely that the storm will hit Houston, further west on the Gulf of Mexico coast.
Stocks came under pressure as the Conference Board reported an alarmingly sharp drop in its consumer confidence index for August. The index, which had been expected to rise to 93.0, instead fell to 84.8 - below even the lows registered in March and April. July's number was also revised down.
The blow was, however, cushioned by another blowout set of numbers from the housing sector, where new home sales rose to their highest since 2007 at 901,000. Economists had predicted only 758,000 ahead of time.
By 9:40 AM ET (1340 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 30 points or 0.1% at 28,278 points. The S&P 500, which closed above 3,400 for the first time on Monday, eked out another 0.1% gain, while the Nasdaq Composite was up by less than 0.1%.
Among individual stocks, Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) stock fell 1.9% after a California district court ruled that it couldn't cut off Epic Games's developer accounts, although it did allow the company to keep Epic's blockbuster game Fortnite off its App Store while the two fight over the level of Apple's commissions for in-app purchases. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), which had warned that blocking the Epic's Unreal Engine from the App Store could threaten other developers in a filing for the case, saw its stock rise 0.5%.
Elsewhere, Best Buy (NYSE:BBY) stock fell 6.7% after it warned that the boom it experienced for electrical goods in response to lockdown measures is petering out.
Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) stock fell 2.3% after news that it will be ejected from the Dow Jones Industrial Average after nearly 100 years. Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) stock and Raytheon (NYSE:RTX) stock, which are also dropping out of the index, fell 1.6% and 2.0% respectively.
The companies that are replacing them, in turn, all rose. Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) stock was up 3.2%, Amgen Inc (NASDAQ:AMGN) stock was up 4.5% and Honeywell (NYSE:HON) stock was up 3.5%.