By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened mixed on Tuesday, ahead of another key session of testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin.
By 9:35 AM ET (1335 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 12 points or 0.1% at 25,583 points. TheS&P 500 was up 0.2% while the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.4%.
Trading is expected to be influenced by quarter-end window dressing, at the end of stocks’ best quarter in over a decade – although that performance is overwhelmingly due to the collapse in the first quarter that was stemmed by massive fiscal and monetary policy stimulus. The market was left cold as the Chicago Purchasing Managers Index rebounded by less than expected in June, to a level of only 36.6.
The threat of fresh lockdown measures in the U.S. also refuses to go away, as a surge in new cases across the South and West led Dr. Anne Schuchart, the principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to say on Monday that the virus is spreading too quickly and too broadly to be brought under control. Various counties in California and Florida have already said their beaches will remain closed over the July 4th weekend.
Among individual stocks, Boeing (NYSE:BA) fell 4.2% after Norwegian Air Shuttle ASA (OL:NWC) canceled an order for 97 aircraft, almost all of which was accounted for by the 737 MAX. Uber (NYSE:UBER) stock rose 3.8% after reports that it's in talks to buy meal delivery service Postmates for around $2.6 billion.
Exxon Mobil (NYSE:XOM) stock fell 2.1% to its lowest in six weeks on concerns that it will have to write billions of dollars off the value of its assets. Rival major Royal Dutch Shell (LON:RDSa) earlier Tuesday said it would take impairments of up to $22 billion in the second quarter to reflect expectations of lower oil and gas prices for the next three years, following a path already beaten by BP (NYSE:BP), Chevron (NYSE:CVX), Hess (NYSE:HES) and Occidental (NYSE:OXY).
Royal Dutch Shell (NYSE:RDSa) ADRs were down 4.3%. U.S. Crude oil prices, which were also knocked by Shell's update, were down 0.6% at $39.45 a barrel.
Elsewhere, Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock hit a new all-time high, rising 2.7% after an internal e-mail was leaked in which founder and CEO Elon Musk still held out hope that the company - which has a valuation of $187 billion - would break even in the three months to June.