Dow, S&P fall for third straight session with inflation data eyed
stocks slipped on Tuesday, giving up modest gains late in the session to send the Dow and S&P 500 to their third straight decline, as investors awaited economic data in a holiday-shortened week to gauge the Federal Reserve's policy path.
Stocks struggled for upward momentum even as Tesla gained 2.92% after CEO Elon Musk unveiled the electric-vehicle maker's one-month trial of its Full Self-Driving technology to existing and new customers in the United States. The stock is up about 4% for the week but remains down more than 28% for the year.
The focus remains on a key reading of the Personal Consumption Expenditures Price Index (PCE), the Fed's preferred inflation gauge. The data is due on Friday, when U.S. markets will be shut for the Good Friday holiday.
The index is expected to have risen 0.4% in February and 2.5% annually. Core inflation, which excludes volatile food and energy components, is estimated to have advanced 0.3% last month, keeping the annual pace at 2.8%, economists polled by Reuters said.
«The big number is Friday. That's the number everyone's going to pay attention to and whatever happens in the meantime is going to be noise, so I don't anticipate a whole lot happening until we get that data point,» said Stephen Massocca, senior vice president at Wedbush Securities in San Francisco.
«The one thing that would be death, death for this market is if somehow something came out that led people to believe that the fed funds rate has not topped out yet. If for some reason people thought the Fed was
