Stock Market Update

[BRIEFING.COM] The start of today's session lacked the same buying spirit that has pervaded the market since the April 7 low. Stocks quickly turned south, reacting to a Q1 GDP report that triggered some stagflation worries with real GDP down 0.3% and the GDP Price Deflator up 3.7%.

The mood turned, however, following the March Personal Income and Spending Report at 10:00 a.m. ET, which showed a nice 0.7% jump in personal spending and unchanged readings for both the PCE and core-PCE Price Indexes on a month-over-month basis.

That data, albeit backward-looking and accounting for a period that preceded "Liberation Day," was a welcome headline distraction that tempered some of the disappointment over the GDP report, the fallout in Starbucks (SBUX 78.67, -6.18, -7.3%) after its earnings report, the weakness in Caterpillar (CAT 305.27, -2.13, -0.7%) after its earnings report, and the drubbing Super Micro Computer (SMCI 30.73, -5.27, -14.7%) has suffered after it issued a fiscal Q3 (March) earnings warning citing some delayed customer platform decisions.

The latter has cast a pall on stocks like NVIDIA (NVDA 106.57, -2.45, -2.3%) and Dell (DELL 90.47, -3.33, -3.6%) that has kept the information technology sector (-0.9%) under wraps. To be fair, though, the sector had been down as much as 2.7%. 

Most stocks have rebounded from worse levels seen shortly after today's open that saw the Nasdaq Composite and S&P 500 slide as much as 2.9% and 2.3%, respectively. The defensive-oriented health care (+0.1%) and consumer staples (+0.1%) sectors are the lone S&P 500 sectors in positive territory.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average is down 0.6%; the S&P 500 is down 0.9%; the Nasdaq Composite and Russell 2000 are down 1.3%.