Wall Street snaps 5-day winning streak, ends day with modest losses

Wall Street recovers a large part of early losses, still closes in red.
Energy sector underperforms on Friday, healthcare shares lead gains.

Eren Sengezer FXStreet

With investors turning their attention to the earnings season that will kick-off on Monday and taking some of their profits off the table, major equity indexes in the United States closed the day modestly lower.

Crude oil's 8-day rally came to an end today and the barrel of West Texas Intermediate settled in the negative territory for the first time in 2019 to weigh on the S&P 500 Energy Index, which lost 0.63% on the day. On the other hand, The S&P 500 Healthcare and the Consumer Staples sectors rose 0.33% and 0.3%, respectively, to lead the gains.

Commenting on today's market action, "We've clawed our way back and now the market is just waiting ahead of the start of earnings season next week. We're just drifting," Donald Selkin, Chief Market Strategist at Newbridge Securities in New York, told Reuters.

Meanwhile, today's data from the U.S. showed that the annual core CPI rose 2.2% in December to match November's reading and came in line with market expectations.

When the closing bell rang, the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 5.97 points, or 0.02%, to 23,995.95, the S&P 500 dropped 0.38 points, or 0.01%, to 2,596.26 and the Nasdaq Composite fell 14.59 points, or 0.21%, to 6,971.48. For the week, these three indexes gained 2.4%, 2.54%, and 3.45%, respectively.

Author

Eren Sengezer

FXStreet

As an economist at heart, Eren Sengezer specializes in the assessment of the short-term and long-term impacts of macroeconomic data, central bank policies and political developments on financial assets.

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