Stock Market Update

[BRIEFING.COM] The opening move by the stock market has been a defensive one, featuring some relative strength in the communication services (+0.1%) and consumer staples (+0.3%) sectors, and in some mega-cap stocks, namely Apple (AAPL 231.03, +3.24, +1.4%), Tesla (TSLA 263.10, +2.64, +1.0%), and Alphabet (GOOG 165.74, +0.45, +0.3%).

Most sectors are lower, but the losses are modest. The biggest losers are the materials (-0.6%), financial (-0.5%), and energy (-0.4%) sectors.

At 9:45 a.m. ET, the September Chicago PMI was released. It checked in at 46.6 (Briefing.com consensus 46.2) versus 46.1 in August. The dividing line between expansion and contraction is 50.0, so the September reading implies that manufacturing activity in the Chicago Fed region contracted in September but at a slower pace than August.