The broader market found itself able to get off the mat Friday, but the Nasdaq continued to lose pace.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 both posted modest gains — the Dow rose 49 points to 11,871, while the S&P 500 posted a much narrower gain of 3 points to 1283.
The Nasdaq slipped another 15 points, or 0.6%, to 2609. The index is now down 2.7% since its intraday high on Tuesday.
While the uncertainty created in shares of Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) after Thursday’s closing bell garnered much of the tech spotlight (and those shares were off 2.4% on Friday), it was a sluggishness in several other tech names that continued to deflate the Nasdaq.
Heavyweights Intel (NASDAQ:INTC), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Cisco (NASDAQ:CSCO) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) all closed lower on Friday — can you really make any upside with that Murderers’ Row underperforming?
Where this brings investors now is that after a 12 month-period of the Nasdaq outperforming broader large-caps by about 10 percentage points, we’ve now closed a week that saw the S&P 500 lose 0.8% while the tech index dropped 1.4%.
While it’s entirely plausible that this is an anamoly that will be reversed next week, what’s worrisome for bulls is the possibility that this week’s correction in tech stocks will continue long enough that it brings the rest of the market with it.
For the broader market, it was a return from some of the former high-flying sectors that had suffered a bit of a beatdown in recent days. Financials and industrials stocks rallied, with a good push from General Electric (NYSE:GE), which posted a strong quarterly earnings report before the opening bell.
But again, small-caps and mid-caps fell — another worry that recent outperformers are becoming underperformers.
Commodities, too, contributed to a feeling that a skimming of the market froth is underway. Gold and silver were 1.4% and 4% lower, respectively. Crude oil fell 2.5% for the week, and closed lower for a fourth-straight session — its longest selloff in 2 months.
With a surge in quarterly earnings reports coming next week, the mood seems to have darkened enough that disappointing stocks will be punished accordingly in the near term.
