Market check: Nasdaq poised to end three-day streak, tech and health care lag

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre breaks down the stock market latest and the sell-off in tech.

Video transcript

ADAM SHAPIRO: Let's see where we're headed with these markets because this always happens the last 20 minutes. Promises to really speed things up, and right now, things have been speeding up to the downside. You can see that the Dow is off about 15 points. The S&P 500 has accelerated a bit to the downside, now down 40 points, and the NASDAQ is off 253 points. Let's get to Jared Blikre, who's watching markets for us today, to help us understand what we might be worrying investors.

JARED BLIKRE: Well, I'll tell you what. It might be the Fed, and it might be inflation. I was watching price action during that Lael Brainard confirmation hearing earlier today, and that was when the S&P 500 took another leg down and went negative. Let's take a look at the YFi Interactive, and I will chart the price action. So NASDAQ the biggest loser, and let's just chart that as well, very similar looking. And here is the relative high just before some comments were made about inflation during that hearing, and then we got that sell-off. And you can see, it took those numbers up, and we are at session lows right now.

And as Emily was saying, the tech sector is the heaviest hit here. And I'm seeing software just flying down-- about flying off the charts, I guess, going in the opposite direction. But you see Microsoft here down 3 and 1/2%, Tesla off more than 4%, NVIDIA off 4%. But the concentration of losses in the software sector just really stunning here. I'm going to put on a seven-day-- or excuse me, a nine-day view. That's how many trading days have occurred in this new year. And you look at the bottom row there. All these stocks down more than 20% are almost that much. We got Atlassian, Zscaler, Shopify, Datadog, MongoDB, and HubSpot. So, really continues to flummox investors there.

But one area where we're seeing a lot of green today is the travel sector. And this comes after some comments yesterday at a CDC hearing that they were going to let the expira-- or they were going to let January 15 come and go without any more cruise line bans. So here's Carnival Cruise Lines up 3% today. Let's take a look at what it's done over the past couple months here. Cruise lines actually did fairly well in December. You can see here is the low almost on the first trading day, or maybe around the first trading day there. And it's been up, up, and away ever since.

Now I want to get to the sector action. And here we see utilities in the lead. So you know that's a defensive day. Industrial staples, energy, a little bit of green there, but nothing major. To the downside, all tech, consumer discretionary, and healthcare. Those are the three biggest losers. Let's just take a look at healthcare. This would be first time today for me. It looks like Thermo Scientific down 3%, Moderna off 5%, BioNTech down 6%. It may have something to do-- that's actually-- that could actually be good news. That could be based on some of the reopening that we're seeing and some of the green that we're seeing in the travel space.

Then in the EV sector, check out Ford. I'm going to put the market cap. Did this an hour ago, but we just want to reiterate, Ford above $100 billion in market cap, above GM. That transition occurred a couple of weeks ago. Tesla above a trillion, though. Nobody touching Tesla, but not in terms of performance today. Tesla down 5%, as Ford up 2%, guys.