Daily Insight: mortgage apps, consumer credit and Fed speeches

U.S. stocks stumbled a bit Wednesday after Fed Chairman Bernanke touched on a number of challenges the economy will have to deal with and a large decline in consumer credit raised concerns about the pace of future consumption. All in all though, especially since the Greece story remained in the headlines, stocks held in there pretty well.

All 10 major industry groups lost ground on the session, with telecom shares leading the decline by a large margin – the index that tracks these shares lost 2.34%, which was well-worse than the 0.59% broad-market decline. Energy and utility shares rounded out the three worst-performing sectors.

The relative winners were tech and health-care, down 0.21% and 0.42%, respectively.

The major indices were able to withstand the rather negative comments from Bernanke, his speech occurred around lunch and an hour later the broad market was hovering just below where we opened. It was the consumer credit report that had the larger effect on sentiment, as the relative slide occurred directly after that release.
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Brent Vondera, Senior Analyst