U.S. stocks lost ground in morning trade on Friday, with technology stocks dragging the main indexes lower, as fears around inflation and the Omicron variant fueled volatile trading.
"In the headline S&P 500, if you look below the surface there is a lot of carnage in tech stocks that were somewhat overvalued and that's what's contributing mostly to the volatility," said Jamie Cox, managing partner at Harris Financial Group.Futures held steady after the Labor Department's report showed nonfarm payrolls increased by 210,000 jobs in November, far below the 550,000 jobs that economists polled by Reuters had forecast.
"With this jobs report it may give them pause to say ok we don't have to accelerate in December. We can give it another few weeks until we have better data from Omicron and we know what we're dealing with," said Thomas Hayes, managing member at Great Hill Capital LLC in New York. Fed Chair Jerome Powell said earlier this week that the U.S. central bank will consider at its upcoming meeting a faster wind-down to its bond-buying program, a move widely seen as opening the door to earlier interest rate hikes.
Equity markets have fluctuated sharply this week as investors digested updates on the newly detected Omicron variant, which is spreading globally and causing countries to reimpose travel restrictions. The main three indexes are on course for weekly losses, with Wall Street's fear gauge, the CBOE Market Volatility indexAt 10:07 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
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