By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets opened mostly lower on Thursday, unwinding a move earlier in the week out of tech and growth stocks and into cyclicals as the market took a more sober view of the obstacles to a Covid-19 vaccine becoming widely available.
The likely difficulties in manufacturing, storing and transporting hundreds of millions of vaccine doses point to significant capacity bottlenecks if and when the Pfizer/Biontech vaccine – or others - are approved for use by the Food and Drug Administration over the coming weeks and months.
That leaves the economy still exposed in the short run to setbacks from the coronavirus, a point illustrated again on Thursday by another week of over 700,000 initial claims for jobless benefits. That came after the U.S. posted a record high for new infections on Wednesday at over 144,000, while also breaking the previous record for hospital admissions.
By 9:40 AM ET (1440 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 173 points, or 0.6%, at 29,224 points. The S&P 500 was down 0.5% while the Nasdaq Composite was up 0.2%, as money flowed back into stocks that have done well from the many disruptions caused by the pandemic.
Among the early winners was Moderna (NASDAQ:MRNA) stock, which rose 5.7% after the biotech company said it is on track to report early data from a late-stage trial of its experimental coronavirus vaccine later this month, and could file for U.S. emergency use authorization in December. Moderna's experimental drug, like Pfizer (NYSE:PFE)'s, is based on so-called messenger RNA (mRNA), leading many to conclude that it will show the same effectiveness.
Another winner was home-improvement stock RH (NYSE:RH), which rose another 4.5% on expectations of fresh lockdown measures to control the virus' spread. Such measures skewed household spending toward home improvement earlier in the year.
For the most part, the moves seen on Thursday were corrective, only partially retracing those seen earlier in the week, when the Pfizer announcement triggered a sharp repricing of risk related to the public health outlook. As such, Carnival (NYSE:CCL) stock was down 4.8% but was still up 8.8% on the week. :Likewise Citigroup (NYSE:C), JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) and Bank of America Corp (NYSE:BAC) stock were all down by between 1.5% and 2.5%, but likewise were still up by between 8% and 11% from a week ago, helped by the sharp rise in bond yields that will expand their lending margins.