Stock Market Update

[BRIEFING.COM] The major indices continue to sport red figures (color of losses), suffering from a lack of influential leadership and valuation concerns triggered by rising interest rates.

Today's selling is broad-based and includes some weakness in the mega-cap space, which was a pocket of relative strength in the first two trading sessions this week. The Vanguard Mega-Cap Growth ETF (MGK) is down 0.7% with NVIDIA (NVDA 140.24, -3.35, -2.3%) and Amazon.com (AMZN 187.71, -1.99, -1.0%) among the main drags.

Losses in the Dow Jones Industrial Average are being paced by McDonald's (MCD 298.71, -15.98, -5.1%), which is contending with reports of an E.coli outbreak; however, MCD has managed to pare a larger loss that exceeded 9.0% in yesterday's after-hours trade.

Existing home sales decreased 1.0% month-over-month in September to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 3.84 million (Briefing.com consensus 3.90 million) from an upwardly revised 3.88 million (from 3.86 million) in August. Sales were down 3.5% from the same period a year ago.

The key takeaway from the report is that more inventory is becoming available, yet it is still a tight market, evidenced by the ongoing increase in the median home price and a very low mortgage delinquency rate.