US stocks lose steam

US stocks finished in the red on Wednesday, with energy and industrials sectors leading the losses.

The Federal Reserve’s Beige Book report said economic growth had downshifted to a moderate pace between July and August.

Stocks are down today and it begs the question: Is this the long-promised start of a correction?

Pehaps, said Nancy Tengler, chief investment officer at Laffer Tengler Investments.

“We think that maybe we are getting close to a correction that may be meaningful,” Tengler said on the CNN Business’ digital live show Markets Now. A dip of 10-15% is a realistic estimate, she added.

“I think you have to be aware of it, but I think this is a buying opportunity,” she said.

So far, company share buybacks have been propping the market up, Tengler added: “What is going on, I think, is that every time we get a bit of a correction, the companies step in,”

But at some point, something’s gotta give.

“We’ve pretty much been rocket to the moon since March 2020,” and it can’t keep going forever. But don’t fret the correction either: “I think it would be good, it would recalibrate,” Tengler said.

A pedestrian walks by a "Now Hiring" sign outside a store on August 16, 2021 in Arlington, Virginia. 

America has a record number of job openings but millions of people are still unemployed.

So what gives? Is it all down to the resurgence in Covid cases?

“The Delta variant is a key factor, but it’s not the only one at play,” said Nela Richardson, chief economist at ADP.

The jobs gains that expected in the late summer — as kids got ready to return to school and the reopening continued — didn’t really happen. The August jobs report sharply disappointed economists’ expectations.

For workers, issues like virus risks, child care challenges and broader considerations about jobs and compensation still dominate the thinking about returning to work.

The first tier is that the nation is still filling back the jobs lost during the worst of the pandemic.

“The second is that the economy is actually changing,” Richardson said.

And this is playing out in the labor market, causing a lot of churn with workers moving jobs while the recovery keeps chugging along.

Diversification is key for any investment portfolio. So why not put some money into art?

Investing in fine art has long been closed off to retail investors, accessible only for the wealthy. But Masterworks wants to change that by democratizing the art world.

“We basically buy paintings that are $1 to $20 million dollar paintings and we take them public,” said Scott Lynn, founder and CEO of the company. “Then investors can buy and trade shares in an artwork, just like they would trade shares in a company.”

Art isn’t correlated to the stock market, so it could be a diversifier for investors.

“We think about art very similarly to how people think about real estate,” Lynn said of the valuations in Masterworks’ portfolio.

The company has $7.5 billion worth of art at the moment, with anonymous street artist Banksy among its hottest names.

It’s lunchtime and the market looks red.

After a mixed morning, where the Dow eked out some time in positive territory, all three major stock indexes are now trading lower.

The Dow is 0.4%, or 153 points, lower. The S&P 500 is down 0.5% and the Nasdaq Composite is down 1%. That mean’s no new record highs are likely to be hit today.

The 10-year US Treasury bond yield is more or less flat at 1.35%.

Elsewhere, Bitcoin is down some 1.5%, trading around the $46,000 mark, according to CoinDesk data.

Stocks are near record highs, even if today’s session is mixed. But that’s not enough to get Bank of America (BAC) excited any more.

The Wall Street bank’s year-end target for the S&P 500, the broadest gauge of the US stock market, is 4,250 points, some 6% below where it is now. The target for end-2022 is 4,600, some 100 points from where the index is now.

“S&P 500 [earnings per share] is up 50% from the Covid trough, and the S&P 500 has doubled,” the bank’s analysts wrote in a note this morning. But what good news is left?

Not very much… the economy is recovering, though the pace of improvements is taking a hit amid the spread of the Delta variant. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve is preparing to normalize its ultra-easy money policies.

Amid this, BofA’s models are closer to a sell signal than at any point since 2007, according to the note.

“Wage/input cost inflation and supply chain shifts are starting to weigh on margins. Interest rate risk is at a record high… And valuations leave no margin for error,” the analysts said.

Prospective employees are interviewed during a job fair on July 9, 2021 in Huntington Park, California. 

America’s tight labor market continues to face a staggering disconnect between the number of jobs available and the number of people out of work.

In July, the number of jobs available in the United States climbed to 10.9 million, a new record high, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Health care and social assistance added the most positions, followed by finance and insurance, as well as hotels and restaurants.

Managers across the board are looking for workers, and the number of hires stood at just 6.7 million. The shortage of workers alongside mass unemployment continues to be an unusual outcome of the pandemic.

The number of quits, layoffs and separations was little changed in July.

Wall Street is taking a breather after Tuesday’s mixed session that included a new all-time high for the Nasdaq Composite.

All three major indexes are looking to start the day slightly lower: The Dow fell 0.2%, or 56 points, while the S&P 500 kicked off 0.1% lower. The Nasdaq opened down 0.2%.

Just a few minutes into the trading day, however, the Dow managed to get back into the green.

On the economic calendar, July job openings are due at 10 am ET.

US stocks ended Tuesday like they started it: mixed. While the Dow and S&P 500 both fell, the Nasdaq Composite finished at a new all-time high, rising 0.1%.

That appears to be the same this morning, with stocks looking sluggish.

Here’s where things stand as of 6:15 am ET:

BlackRock’s new investment fund in China — the first owned entirely by a foreign firm — has attracted $1 billion from Chinese investors in its first week.

The world’s largest asset manager said Wednesday that the fund — which has now raised 6.68 billion yuan — was officially established this week and has attracted more than 111,000 investors. It started offering investment products to individual Chinese investors late last month.

Read more here.