Markets in the red after S&P 500 closes at highest level since January

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre examines the market action heading into the final trading hour of the day, the chip and semiconductor space, Apple‘s place in the payment system industry, and Chinese stocks.

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: Major averages, they are lower across the board. The Dow Jones Industrial Average down by about 4/10 of a percent, 156 points in decline right now. S&P 500, you’re also seeing that in the red by about 8/10 of a percent, 37 points in the red. The NASDAQ Composite– that, too, is in the red by about 170 points, just a little bit more than that, as we’re tracking declines for the tech-heavy average of about 1.2% here on the day. 9 out of 11 S&P 500 sectors in negative territory as well. And for more on today’s tape, let’s sprint on over to the YFi Interactive, where Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre is standing by. Jared? JARED BLIKRE: That’s right, and I’m looking at our world view on the YFi Interactive. And small caps are actually the biggest laggards today, down about 1 and 1/2%. And you can see here, this is the intraday price action. We are at session lows right now. However, in the big picture, the grand scheme of things, we are still in the midst of a 12-day rally. And on this year-to-date chart, you can see, been up, up, and away here, so just taking a little pause. By the way, I mentioned the other day that there’s about $22 billion of stock to be sold by pension funds as they rebalance at the end of the month, could be partly responsible for a little bit of the downdraft that we’re seeing today. Now, energy and utilities are the only sectors in the green right now. Consumer discretionary, tech, financials, all of those are in the red for more than 1%, and a lot of those names are in the NASDAQ. And we can see here, Nvidia down 3 and 1/2%, some weakness in the chip space. But well, I guess the– the outstanding stock this morning, Micron, still in the red, down 3 and– 3.8% after reporting a little bit of a disappointing outlook in its earnings. Now, we do want to focus on some of the stories of the day. One of those is by Apple itself. And let me navigate to our payments workspace. Apple, according to Bloomberg, is working on generating its own payment system. And so this is going to be part of payment processing, risk assessment for lending, fraud analysis, credit checks, and this is according to a Bloomberg report. And we see some of these stocks, their competitors, future competitors, in this space are taking a little bit of a hit, down 3% to 4%. You can see Square– the Block– is down about 4 and 1/2%. Also checking out another story. This has to do with Chinese listed names. Now, the SEC has been going after companies that it’s not satisfied or doing a good job with their audits. There’s a new law that they’re enforcing that puts some of these companies on a three-year timetable to clean up their practices or face delisting in the US. Baidu is the latest one of those names. And you can see it’s down 2 and 1/2% today, so not the biggest reaction, not big reactions like we’ve seen recently on some of these names, but nevertheless another thread here for these firms to– well, I guess try and wiggle their way through here. It’s been nothing but bad news for a lot of these Chinese stocks this year so far. Guys? RACHELLE AKUFFO: Indeed. Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre there.