Markets close with losses, energy and utilities lead, Chinese stocks lean to the upside

Yahoo Finance markets reporter Emily McCormick breaks down the market and sector actions heading into the close, in addition to looking at Nasdaq leaders and Chinese tech stocks.

Video transcript

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RACHELLE AKUFFO: Just minutes away from the closing bell, as the major indices really accelerating their losses into the close. Let's get over to Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick for more. Emily?

EMILY MCCORMICK: Well, Rachelle, it's been a choppy day in the markets. Stocks not quite holding onto their morning gains, nor are they holding onto momentum after logging their second best week of 2022 just last week. Now, as we can see, the S&P 500 heading for losses of about 0.4% heading into market close here, also heading for month to date losses even after the gains that we saw last week of more than 6%. A similar story here when we take a look at the NASDAQ composite as well as the Dow Jones Industrial average, each heading for losses on the day.

Now, if we look inside the S&P 500, what we'll see in terms of the leadership is quite the opposite of what we had in markets yesterday or rather last week when we had energy, of course, leading to the downside, whereas we had technology stocks leading to the upside. We can now see that the complete opposite is now playing out, with energy moving higher by nearly 3% inside the S&P 500, whereas we have communication services and consumer discretionary leading to the downside.

And inside the NASDAQ 100, it is really clear to see that we are seeing these losses really taking place inside of many of these major large cap technology stocks, including Amazon as well as Apple.

Now, one area that I do want to highlight that is moving to the upside today, those are those US-listed Chinese tech stocks. Names like Alibaba as well as jd.com really leading to the upside today. This all coming as Shanghai, Beijing, and some other major areas in China loosen COVID restrictions. So at least one positive area as of now.