US stocks hold weaker amid lingering US-China trade tensions

Major US equity indices witnessed yet another weaker opening on Thursday, with the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) on track to extend its losing streak for the eight consecutive sessions.

A full-blown trade war is now getting closer to reality, which continued weighing on investors' sentiment and dampened demand for perceived riskier assets - like equities. Market participants now seemed worried that trade tensions between the world's two largest economies could potentially turn out to be a headwind for the global economy.

Adding to this, a drop in oil prices, amid firming expectations that OPEC might be nearing a deal to increase production, exerted downward pressure on energy stocks and further collaborated to the weaker tone on Thursday. 

Meanwhile, tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index continues to outperform the broader markets and once again managed to score a fresh all-time high during the opening hour of trade on Thursday, albeit struggled to sustain early gains and has now drifted into negative territory.

On the economic data front, the initial weekly jobless claims declined by 3,000 to 218K during the week ended June 16 and remained near multi-decade lows. The positive reading, to a larger extent, was negated by a larger than expected drop in the Philly Fed manufacturing index, coming to at 19.9 for June as compared to 34.4 in May. 

At the time of writing this report, DJIA lost over 85-point to 24,575, while the broader S&P 500 Index was down nearly 4-points to 2.764 and Nasdaq slipped over 4-points to 7,777.