Wall Street dips with Apple, other tech shares

By Caroline Valetkevitch

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. stocks edged lower on Wednesday, weighed down by a decline in Apple as it unveiled larger iPhones but made just minor changes to its offerings, and other technology shares.

Apple shares were down 1.4 percent. The company also unveiled health-oriented watches based on the design of current models.

Shares of fitness device rival Fitbit Inc fell 5.9 while shares of Garmin Ltd lost some earlier gains and were flat after the launch of Apple's latest Apple Watch.

"You had the (Apple) announcement, and the typical trader reaction was there wasn't anything that wasn't already rumoured or expected from the announcement, so some of yesterday's gains are being given back today," said Michael James, managing director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles.

 

The S&P technology index <.SPLRCT> was down about 0.7 percent, reversing Tuesday's gains, with fears of further deregulation also hurting Apple as well as social media names.

Six major Web and Internet service companies, including Apple, are to detail their consumer data privacy practices to a U.S. Senate panel on Sept. 26, raising the spectre of the possibility of stricter regulation.

The Dow was essentially flat as a report of fresh U.S.-China trade talks helped some industrial companies.

At 2:48PM ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average <.DJI> fell 6.24 points, or 0.02 percent, to 25,964.82, the S&P 500 <.SPX> lost 1.84 points, or 0.06 percent, to 2,886.05 and the Nasdaq Composite <.IXIC> dropped 37.27 points, or 0.47 percent, to 7,935.21.

"Some of the industrial names, Boeing being the most notable, are what's leading the outperformance of the Dow," James said. Boeing shares were up 2.1 percent.

The Wall Street Journal reported that Washington has proposed a new round of trade talks with Beijing before the Trump administration implements additional tariffs on Chinese imports.

Among the six companies to testify later this month, Twitter shares were down 4 percent, while Alphabet was down 1.9 percent and Amazon.com was down down 0.4 percent.

Facebook , not among the companies to testify, was down 2.4 percent.

The Philadelphia Semiconductor index <.SOX> was down 1.7 percent after Goldman Sachs became the latest brokerage to warn of lower prices for memory chips due to an oversupply of DRAM and NAND chips.

Micron slid 5.2 percent, while Applied Materials was down 2.3 percent.

Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a 1.31-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.24-to-1 ratio favoured decliners.

The S&P 500 posted 29 new 52-week highs and 6 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 67 new highs and 82 new lows.

(Additional reporting by Shreyashi Sanyal in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Cynthia Osterman)