Stocks Fell on Weak Earnings, Trump Policies

U.S. stocks fell in the early trading on Tuesday after disappointing earnings from a raft of companies and uncertainty following President Donald Trump’s recent decisions. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lately dropped 127.84 points, or 0.64%, to 19,843.29. The S&P 500 was down 8.78 points, or 0.38%, to 2,272.12. The Nasdaq Composite lost 16.48 points, or 0.29%, to 5,597.23.

Exxon Mobil Corp said on Tuesday its quarterly profit fell 40 percent after it wrote down the value of Rocky Mountain natural gas assets. The company posted fourth-quarter earnings of $1.68 billion, or 41 cents per share, compared with $2.78 billion, or 67 cents per share, in the year-ago period.
The Federal Reserve is likely to stand pat on interest rates at the end of their two-day meeting on Wednesday, awaiting more clarity on fiscal policy.

Package delivery company United Parcel Service Inc on Tuesday posted a quarterly loss caused by a pension charge, and forecast full-year profit below analysts’ expectations. The company reported a fourth-quarter net loss of $239 million, or 27 cents per share, compared with a net profit of $1.33 billion, or $1.48 per share, a year earlier. Revenue in the quarter rose to $16.93 billion from $16.05 billion a year earlier.

Apple (AAPL) will announce its Q1 2017 earnings on Tuesday. Last quarter, Apple sold 5.2% fewer iPhones than in Q4 2015. Seeing an improvement in Q1 2017 could prove especially difficult, as Q1 2016 was the company’s best quarter ever with all-time record iPhone sales.

Japanese video game maker Nintendo Co.’s third-quarter profit more than doubled from a year earlier on healthy sales of Pokemon game software, the company said Tuesday. It reported a better-than-expected October-December profit of 64.7 billion yen ($569 million), up from 29.1 billion yen in the same period of 2015.