Wall Street falls; Apple, Goldman Sachs shares under pressure

By April Joyner

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Wall Street's major indexes fell on Monday, with the S&P 500 weighed by technology and financial stocks as shares of Apple Inc and Goldman Sachs Group Inc came under pressure.

Apple shares fell 4.7 percent after several suppliers to the company, including Lumentum Holdings Inc , whose components power the iPhone's Face ID technology, cut their forecasts. Apple's decline impeded the tech-heavy Nasdaq, which fell more than 2 percent.

Lumentum shares plunged 32.7 percent. Shares of several chipmakers that sell to Apple, such as Cirrus Logic Inc , Qorvo Inc and Skyworks Solutions Inc , dropped as well. The Philadelphia SE Semiconductor index <.SOX> dropped 4.2 percent.

 

"Apple suppliers have had some problems," said J.J. Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago. "It could be that worldwide demand (for the iPhone) cools off."

Goldman Sachs shares dropped 7.2 percent after Bloomberg reported that Malaysian Finance Minister Lim Guan Eng said the country was seeking a full refund of all the fees it paid to the Wall Street bank for arranging billions of dollars of deals for troubled state fund 1MDB. Goldman Sachs was the biggest drag on the Dow, which fell nearly 2 percent.

Among the S&P 500's 11 major sectors, technology and financial stocks weighed most heavily on the index. The S&P 500 technology sector index <.SPLRCT> fell 3.3 percent, and the financial sector index <.SPSY> fell 1.8 percent.

"It's an ugly sell-off across the board, led by Apple and Goldman," Kinahan said.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average <.DJI> fell 550.38 points, or 2.12 percent, to 25,438.92, the S&P 500 <.SPX> lost 48.95 points, or 1.76 percent, to 2,732.06 and the Nasdaq Composite <.IXIC> dropped 187.49 points, or 2.53 percent, to 7,219.42.

A holiday in the U.S. bond markets for Veterans Day kept trading volume muted.

"With the bond market closed, there is a lack of catalyst to push the market higher," said Lindsey Bell, investment strategist at CFRA Research in New York.

General Electric Co shares fell 7.2 percent after Chief Executive Officer Larry Culp said the company was saddled with too much debt and would urgently sell assets to reduce levels of leverage. The shares dropped below $8 for the first time since March 2009.

Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a 2.05-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 2.33-to-1 ratio favoured decliners.

The S&P 500 posted 29 new 52-week highs and 10 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 21 new highs and 139 new lows.

(Reporting by April Joyner; Additional reporting by Sruthi Shankar in Bengaluru; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta and Nick Zieminski)