Nasdaq Leads Another Wall Street Slump

Wall Street's major indexes ended sharply lower on Wednesday, extending their recent rout as Ukraine declared a state of emergency and the US State Department said a Russian invasion of Ukraine remains potentially imminent.

Earlier, the West unveiled more sanctions against Russia over its move into eastern Ukraine, and Moscow began evacuating its Kyiv embassy.

Nasdaq led the day's decline, falling more than 2 percent, while the information technology sector dropped 2.6 percent and was the biggest drag on the S&P 500.

"If anything (Russian) President Putin is digging his heels in despite the increased sanctions," said Michael James, managing director of equity trading at Wedbush Securities in Los Angeles. "That's really adding to elevated nervousness about further aggressive actions and what that will mean for commodities and inflation overall."

The Dow came within a hair's breadth of confirming it was in a correction on Wednesday, while the S&P 500 in the previous session confirmed it was in a correction when the index ended down more than 10 percent from its January 3 closing record high. A correction is confirmed when an index closes 10 percent or more below its record closing level.

The Nasdaq has tumbled more than 16percent so far this year,

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1.38 percent, to 33,132, the S&P 500 lost 1.84 percent, to 4,225 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.57 percent, to 13,037.

Investors havealso been on edge about possible aggressive tightening by the Federal Reserve to combat inflation.

"There's been geopolitical risks and rhetoric that have given investors that much more to be worried about," said Liz Young, head of investment strategy at SoFi.

"What it's done is exacerbate the momentum that was already in place to the downside," she said. "What we were seeing already coming into this was clearly a compression in multiples across a number of different highly valued areas of the market." (Reuters)