S&P 500 on track for worst start to a year since 1970

The S&P 500 hasn't performed this badly in the first six months of a year since 1970, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Since the beginning of 2022, the index has dropped nearly 20 percent.

And things could still get worse. "The question is when we hit a market bottom and when we get that turning point, and it's not necessarily straight away," Eloise Goulder of JPMorgan Chase told the Journal.

Stock prices jumped early Tuesday but finished the day lower than they started, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average down 1.6 percent, the S&P 500 down two percent, and the Nasdaq Composite down three percent. The Journal attributes this loss of momentum to "data from the Conference Board," which "showed consumers' short-term outlook for the U.S. economy" at "its lowest point in nearly a decade."

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Tech stocks also dropped, with Amazon down 5.1 percent and Apple, Microsoft, and Alphabet — the parent company of Google — down at least three percent each.