Goldman Sachs, Travelers drag Dow lower
STORY: U.S. stocks ended mixed on Tuesday, with the Dow the biggest loser as weak earnings from Goldman Sachs dragged the index lower.
The Dow shed more than 1.1%, the S&P dropped .2% while the Nasdaq gained just over .1%.
George Cipolloni is portfolio manager at Penn Mutual Asset Management.
“So what really hurt Goldman in particular is that their EPS was down about 69%. I mean, that's a pretty steep number. And it's one the market, again, just really wasn't expecting. Just like most of the industry, everybody’s going through a round of layoffs and job cuts and the reason for that is they’re trying to defend margin. And so Goldman seems to be a little bit behind the curve, relative to at least Morgan Stanley, which also reported today.”
While shares of Morgan Stanley rose by nearly 6% after beating analysts’ estimates for fourth-quarter profit, Goldman’s slumped by more than 6%.
Also weighing on the blue-chip Dow index was insurer Travelers, which fell 4.6% after forecasting fourth-quarter earnings below estimates.
But a 7.4% jump in Tesla helped keep the Nasdaq afloat after sales surged in China thanks to recent price cuts the company made on its top-selling models – that’s according to data from China Merchants Bank International.
Equity markets have posted a strong start to the year after a dismal 2022, on hopes of easing inflation and slower interest rate hikes by the Federal Reserve that it is using to combat high prices.
