By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stock markets turned lower in early trade on Tuesday as a gloomy drumbeat of news on the public health front inevitably focused attention on the weaker offerings from the ongoing earnings season.
By 10 AM ET (1400 GMT), the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 32 points, or 0.1% at 27,653 points. The S&P 500 was up 0.1%, but the Nasdaq Composite managed a gain of 0.6%. All three had suffered their worst day in over a month on Monday as the market reacted to record-high numbers of new infections of Covid-19 across the U.S., and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows' unguarded admission at the weekend that "we're not going to control the virus."
Delated market hopes for a stimulus package before next week's election were mirrored in an unexpected decline in the Conference Board's monthly consumer confidence index, to 100.9 from a downwardly-revised 101.8. By contrast, durable goods orders for September, released earlier, were slightly above expectations.
Representative of the general mood was a 5.1% drop in Eli Lilly (NYSE:LLY) stock after the life sciences company said it will end an unsuccessful test of its experimental antibody treatment for Covid-19. Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT) stock, seen by some as a rough proxy for the overall economy, fell 2.8% after it reported third-quarter profit down by over half from last year, with all three major business lines suffering. The stock, which had enjoyed a solid rally on hopes that the world economy was over the worst of the pandemic, is still up over 50% its low in May.
In brighter news, Harley-Davidson (NYSE:HOG) stock rose 23% after a rise in quarterly profit more than outweighed a 10% drop in U.S. sales, providing the first major sign that its turnaround efforts are gaining traction.
Elsewhere, Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ:AMD) stock fell 3.7% on the big merger news of the day, its $35 billion all-stock deal for rival chipmaker Xilinx (NASDAQ:XLNX). Xilinx stock rose 8.9% on perceptions that the valuation terms were generous to the smaller company's shareholders. The news put fresh pressure on Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) stock, amid concerns that Intel will now face tougher competition for its data center chip business. Intel fell 2.8%.
Shopify (NYSE:SHOP) stock rose 2.9% after announcing a deal to partner with TikTok to help its million merchants advertise their products through the video streaming service.