Investing.com – Wall Street traded lower on Friday as Amazon entered the grocery arena, spooking investors in stocks of other retail giants, and disappointing economic data only served to further dampen investor enthusiam.
At 10:54AM ET (14:54GMT), the Dow Jones fell 46 points, or 0.22%, the S&P 500 lost 10 points, or 0.42%, while the Nasdaq Composite traded down 37 points, or 0.60%.
Shares in Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) shot up 3% announced Friday it would buy U.S. organic supermarket chain Whole Foods Market (NASDAQ:WFM) for $13.7 billion, including debt, marking the internet retailer's largest deal and biggest foray into the brick-and-mortar retail sector. Shares in the acquisition target soared up nearly 27% to nearly match the $42 per share offer.
The move caused shock for investors in competitive shares. Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT) led the Dow lower with losses of more than 6%, while other competitors such as Target (NYSE:TGT), Krogers (NYSE:KR) or United Natural Foods (NASDAQ:UNFI) all tumbled more than 10%.
Adding to the bloodbath, the preliminary publication of the data for June from the University of Michigan's Consumer Survey Center showed that consumer sentiment unexpectedly declined to 94.5 from 97.1 in the previous month, missing consensus that had expected no change.
The downbeat reading of consumer confidence added to jitters from a release on Wednesday that showed an unexpected deterioration in retail sales.
In other disappointing data, housing starts hit an eighth-month low in May, while building permits also registered a surprise tumble to its lowest level in little over a year.
Meanwhile, oil edged higher on Friday but was still down around 2.5% from last Friday in what would be its fourth consecutive week of losses.
Crude prices were off around 13% since late May when OPEC and non-OPEC producers agreed to extend their agreement to curb oil production.
Rising U.S. oil output, particularly from shale drillers, is contributing to the ineffectiveness of the OPEC-led cuts and spurring concern over the inability for the agreement to reduce the global supply glut.
On that last note, investors also looked ahead to the Baker Hughes' U.S. rig count data for the latest week to be released at 1:00PM (17:00GMT).
The prior data showed that U.S. drillers added rigs for the 21st week in a row, the longest such streak on record, implying that further gains in domestic production are ahead.
U.S. crude futures gained 0.38% to $44.63 by 10:57AM ET (14:57GMT), while Brent oil rose 0.66% to $47.23.