Investing.com – After marking its first three-day winning streak this year, Wall Street took a breather on Thursday with investors taking profits in stocks as Wal-Mart’s earnings and the OECD’s cut to the global growth forecast weighed on sentiment and the EIA report put a damper on oil’s rally.
U.S. stocks moved into the red with the Dow Jones Industrial Average slipping 0.2%, the S&P 500 dropping 0.4% and the Nasdaq 100 losing 0.7% at 16:30GMT or 11:30AM ET.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) cut its global growth forecast for 2016 to an expansion 3.0%, down from November’s prediction of 3.3%.
The Paris-based think tank expects the U.S. economy to grow by 2.0% in 2016 and 2.2% in 2017, down from November’s projected expansions of 2.5% and 2.4%, respectively.
Adding to the dimmer outlook for world-wide growth, Wal-Mart (N:WMT) reported mixed earnings and cut its revenue forecast for its fiscal year 2017. The world’s largest retailer led the decliners on the Dow Jones, falling more than 4%.
On the opposite end of the blue-chip index, IBM (N:IBM) led the gains with a rise of more than 5% after announcing the purchase of Truven Health Analytics for $2.6 billion in another move to expand its health division with more medical data.
Crude oil, in the meantime, added to Wednesday’s rally and spent most of Thursday’s session with gains of more than 3% after Iran backed plans by Russia and Saudi Arabia to freeze production at January levels.
However, investors took profits after the Energy Information Administration (EIA) report showed that U.S. inventory stockpiles increased by 2.1 million barrels.
The EIA data was in direct contrast to the 3.3 million barrel drop previously reported by the American Petroleum Institute (API).
Crude oil futures for March delivery traded down 0.1% at 16:30GMT or 11:30AM ET.
On the economic data front, U.S. jobless claims provided some sign of optimism after unexpectedly dropping by 7,000 to 262,000 last week, compared to the 6,000 increase expected by analysts.
First-time jobless claims have held below the 300,000-level for 49 consecutive weeks, which is usually associated with a firming labor market.
Meanwhile, official data from the Philadelphia Fed showed that manufacturing activity in the region during February contracted less-than-expected.
Finally, the Conference Board leading economic index for the month of January continued to decline with a 0.2% drop that came in-line with analyst estimates and was a smaller decrease than the prior month’s 0.3% fall.