Stock Market Update

[BRIEFING.COM] There's a negative bias in today's trade. Decliners lead advancers by a 4-to-1 margin at the NYSE and by a better than 2-to-1 margin at the Nasdaq. The price action reflects some normal consolidation activity after the S&P 500 (-0.3%) and Dow Jones Industrial Average (-0.7%) reached record highs last week.

Rising market rates have precipitated the profit-taking activity. The 10-yr yield is up seven basis points to 4.14% and the 2-yr yield is up five basis points to 4.00%.

Losses in the equity market are broad based. 25 of the 30 Dow components are lower and ten of the 11 S&P 500 sectors trade down. The information technology sector (+0.4%) is alone in positive territory thanks to gains in NVIDIA (NVDA 141.32, +3.22, +2.4%) and Apple (AAPL 236.46, +1.45, +0.6%).

The rate-sensitive real estate sector (-1.8%) shows the largest decline, responding to price action in the bond market.

The health care sector (-0.8%) is another influential loser, weighed down by a loss in Cigna (CI 320.68, -15.31, -4.6%) following a Bloomberg report that it was in talks to takeover Humana (HUM 263.47, -3.67, -1.4%).

Separately, the CBOE Volatility Index is up 5.0%, or 0.90, to 18.93, reflecting hedging against further downside in the market.

Reviewing today's economic data:

• September Leading Indicators -0.5% (Briefing.com consensus -0.3%); Prior was revised to -0.3% from -0.2%