US shares can't get rally going with longest drought since '94

By Joseph Ciolli
Updated March 27 2015 - 11:13am, first published 10:58am
NYSE floor Governor Nicholas Brigandi, centre, works with traders on the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Richard Drew
NYSE floor Governor Nicholas Brigandi, centre, works with traders on the New York Stock Exchange. Photo: Richard Drew

Stringing together gains in the American stock market has become next to impossible.

Knocked down 1.5 per cent Wednesday, the Standard & Poor's 500 Index has now gone 26 days without posting gains in back-to- back sessions, the longest stretch since 1994.

Losses in biotechnology and chip companies dragged US stocks to a third day of declines, interrupting another run at a record for the Nasdaq Composite Index as investors sold the year's best-performing equities.

"You have markets that are pretty gun-shy," Michael Ball, who oversees about $US800 million $1 billion) as president of Weatherstone Capital Management in Denver. "Whatever the news story of the day, it seems to counteract a lot of what we saw the prior day."

The S&P 500 slipped 0.2 per cent to 2,056.15 at 4 pm in New York. The gauge hasn't increased for two straight days since February 17.

Flat for the year, the benchmark US equity index sits at a level it first reached on November 21. Since then, stocks in the gauge rose as much as 2.6 per cent to an all-time peak of 2,117.39 before sliding back to the current price.

Investors never came close to a streak like this one last year. The longest stretch without back-to-back gains in 2014 was 11 days.

Chipmakers, biotech decline

Wednesday's losses, the worst for the Nasdaq since April, were spurred by selloffs in semiconductor and biotechnology companies. The Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index dropped 4.6 per cent, the most since October amid decreases of more than 2.9 per cent in Nvidia Corp., Micron Technolog., Broadcom and Intel.

The first quarter's best performing stocks are the ones falling the most now. Biogen and First Solar, which surged more than 35 perc ent in 2015 through last Friday's trading, slipped more than 3.8 per cent. The iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF, which increased 21 per cent year-to-date through Friday, fell 4.1 per cent.

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