By Kate Gibson, MarketWatch
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) — U.S. stocks opened lower Friday, with the S&P 500 curtailing weekly gains after an extended rise, after Chinese trade data yielded disappointing results.
“We’re just reacting to the China data, even though we didn’t care about it yesterday,” Peter Boockvar, equity strategist at Miller Tabak in New York. On Friday, China’s customs bureau said the nation’s exports rose a less-than-expected 1% in July from the year-ago period, and imports climbed 4.7%.
Thursday reports showed China’s industrial output growth at a three-year low, with retail sales below estimates and the inflation rate declining to a 30-month low. Read more on Asia data.
“We don’t move on import prices,” Boockvar added of U.S. data. The Commerce Department said early Friday prices paid for U.S. imports slid 0.6% in July. Read more on import prices.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA -0.18% fell 53.77 points, or 0.4%, to 13,111.42.
The S&P 500 index SPX -0.20% declined 5.47 points, or 0.4%, to 1,397.33, with energy falling the hardest among its 10 sectors.
The Nasdaq Composite COMP -0.28% lost 8.88 points, or 0.3%, to 3,009.75.
For every share rising nearly two fell on the New York Stock Exchange, where composite volume reached 215 million as of 9:45 a.m. Eastern.
“We’ve been talking about the tug of war for a while of the slowing global economy on the one hand, and central bankers trying to fight it tooth and nail on the other hand,” Miller Tabak’s Boockvar said of the underlying market issues.
Making its market debut on the NYSE, Manchester United Plc MANU +0.21% raised $233.3 million in its IPO, with shares of the English soccer club priced at $14 each, beneath the marketed $16 to $20 range.
On Thursday, restaurant-chain operator CKE Inc. delayed its IPO.
Kate Gibson is a reporter for MarketWatch, based in New York.
