Retail investors sure tried. They bought $1.93 billion in stocks on Monday.
But after a solidly higher open today, Tuesday, September 21, that saw the Standard & Poor’s 500 up 0.78% at 9:48 a.m., stocks drifted slowly lower for the rest of the day as a second day of buying on the dip failed to emerge.
The S&P 500 closed down 0.08% for the day and the Dow Jones Industrial Average was off 0.15%. The NASDAQ Composite ended the day up 0.22% and the small cap Russell 2000 closed ahead by 0.18%
In the afternoon a forecast of lower subscriber growth for its streaming service took Disney lower. The stock dropped beginning at around 2:30 p.m. and closed down 4.17% for the day. After hours prices slide on a a cut to forecast full-year earnings from FedEx (FDX). The stock had been up during he regular session but traded lower by 4.07% in the after-hours session. (FedEx, which ships a big share of everything, is seen as an indicator for U.S. economic activity. A lower forecast from FedEx isn’t good news for anyone.)
Volatility, which had tumbled earlier in the day, picked up as the day went on. The CBOE S&P 500 Volatility index (VIX), which had been as low as 22.92 at 12:15 p.m. New York time, climbed to finished the day at 24.36, down 5.25% on the day.
Tomorrow brings news from the U.S. Federal Reserve’s regular meeting and from the People’s Bank of China on liquidity in that country’s financial markets. You can understand if traders didn’t want to get in front of that news today.
