The autumn pullback in the stock market worsened Friday, pushing the S&P 500 into a correction and to its worst two-week decline of the year.
The broad stock-market gauge wavered for much of the day before turning lower and losing 0.5% for the session, bringing it down more than 10% from its recent high.
A drop in shares of Chevron and JPMorgan Chase helped send the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 367 points, or 1.1%, to its lowest closing level since March.
The Nasdaq Composite eked out a 0.4% gain, though the tech-heavy index finished well off its session highs. The index entered a correction earlier in the week and has fallen for three consecutive weeks.
The mood in the market has darkened in October as investors have parsed a wave of earnings results from some of the biggest companies in America while navigating a punishing bond rout.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note breached 5% for the first time in 16 years in early trading Monday, keeping many investors glued to the bond market throughout the week. It settled at 4.846% on Friday.
“Bonds and yields are in the driver’s seat right now for markets,” said Adam Turnquist, chief technical strategist at LPL Financial. “Yields simply moved too high, too fast.”
The sharp ascent in bond yields has triggered volatility across markets. The S&P 500 and Dow Jones Industrial Average are on track to finish October with three consecutive months of losses, the worst such stretch since the three months ending March 2020.
The week was marked with even bigger swings under the surface for everything from technology heavyweights to oil giants. Shares of companies that investors cheered for much of the year—and that had sent major indexes soaring—were particularly hard-hit.
Alphabet’s earnings disappointed investors, sending the stock down almost 10% for the week, the worst showing since November. Shares of Meta Platforms lost around 3.9% for the week.
Chevron shares lost 13%, the worst weekly decline in more than a year, after the company reported quarterly earnings that were sharply lower than a year earlier.
Analysts expect S&P 500 earnings to grow 2.7% for the quarter, the first period of growth since the third quarter of 2022, according to FactSet. Still, that isn’t doing much to buoy the stock market.
