U.S. stocks were mostly lower Monday afternoon as investors returned from a three-day weekend to the start of a busy week for data and the first-quarter earnings season.
How are stocks trading?
The Dow Jones Industrial Average
DJIA,
+0.17%
advanced 62 points, or 0.2%, to 33,548 after flipping between small gains and losses.
The S&P 500
SPX,
-0.03%
was down 5 points, or 0.1%, at 4,100.
The Nasdaq Composite
COMP,
-0.13%
shed 35 points, or 0.3%, to trade at 12,053.
What’s driving the markets? Stocks were mostly lower on Monday, with Apple Inc.
AAPL,
-1.81%
leading the Dow industrial’s decliners after market intelligence provider International Data Corp. reported that global personal-computer shipments sank 29% from a year ago on weak demand, excess inventory, and a worsening economic environment. Apple shares fell 1.9% in afternoon trading.More economic updates are on the way this week, with the focus on Wednesday’s consumer-price index reading for March, producer prices on Thursday and retail sales on Friday.Also on Friday, some of the biggest Wall Street banks will mark the start of first-quarter earnings season, and the recent banking crisis has some analysts nervous about what to expect from those institutions. JPMorgan Chase JPM, Citigroup C and Wells Fargo WFC are among the big names expected to report.Read: Banks on the line for deposit flows and margin pressure in Q1 updates as they reel from banking crisis“For the most part, investors remain in complete wait-and-see mode to see which banks shake off the March concerns faster than others, and what might be coming next from management guidance,” said Jim Vogel, executive vice president at FHN Financial in Memphis. Meanwhile, “you’ve got a belief that the Fed is going to raise rates in a couple of weeks, removing some of the optimism from last week that the Fed might be done raising rates for a while,” he said via phone.Prior hopes that the Federal Reserve’s rate-hiking program might be nearing an end have helped interest-rate sensitive tech stocks gain 15% year to date as of Monday, outperforming an almost 7% rise for the S&P 500 and a 1.2% gain for the Dow. But data released last Friday showed the U.S. added 236,000 new jobs in March, undercutting hopes for a big slowdown in hiring and possibly opening the door to another interest-rate hike in May. Economists polled by The Wall Street Journal had predicted 238,000 new jobs would be created. The unemployment rate edged down to 3.5% from 3.6% and hourly wages rose a mild 0.3%.“The employment report was solid and gave the green light to the Fed to go along its path of hiking rates in May,” said Lauren Henderson, an economist at Stifel, Nicola …