What moves markets? Sometimes, it’s not much more than rumors that may or may not be true. We saw a little bit of that yesterday, when the S&P 500 index was fighting a losing streak that dated back to last week, but was up as the end of the trading day neared.
Then Bloomberg News reported it had gotten its hands on an email sent from Wal-Mart to one of its suppliers, reading “We are looking at reducing inventory for Q3 and Q4.” The intimation that sales may be dropping made the market suddenly turn south, and the S&P, instead of posting a modest gain, ended up dropping 2 points.
But the whole story may have been over nothing. Wal-Mart later denied that it was trimming inventory for the latter part of the year. “We have thousands of buyers across thousands of categories,” a spokesman said. “We are increasing orders in some categories and decreasing in others." But even though everything may be hunky-dory at Wal-Mart, the afternoon’s damage had been done.
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