By Geoffrey Smith
Investing.com -- U.S. stocks opened unevenly on Tuesday, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average retracing from its Monday high and the Nasdaq Composite hitting a new record after a mixed bag of earnings.
Helping the tone was also a stronger than expected JOLTS survey, which showed the number of job openings markedly higher at 6.646 million. Analysts had expected a figure of only 6.50 million.
By 10 AM ET (1500 GMT), the Dow Jones was down 110 points, or 0.3%, at 31,276 points. The S&P 500, which closed above 3,900 for the first time on Monday, was down 0.1%, while the Nasdaq was up 0.2%.
Among individual stocks, Shopify (NYSE:SHOP) rose 4.7% to a new record high after saying it would expand its checkout system to Facebook and Instagram. The news also helped Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) stock to a 2.3% gain.
Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) stock fell 1.5%, against a backdrop of two big safety-related incidents in the last week. The company was publicly criticized in China over quality issues on Monday, less than a week after being forced to recall over 160,000 vehicles in the U.S. over faulty touch screen controls last week. The company's $1.5 billion bet on Bitcoin, meanwhile, continued to divide opinion, but appeared to benefit the digital currency more than it did Tesla stock.
Concerns that the Securities and Exchanges Commission may look into Tesla CEO Elon Musk's cheerleading for cryptocurrencies around the transaction also appeared to weigh, with Reuters reporting that a Reddit user claiming to be a Tesla employee had claimed that the company bought over half of its Bitcoin more than a month ago.
S&P Global (NYSE:SPGI) stock rose 3.3% after the financial information company beat expectations with its quarterly results thanks to volatile conditions in its key markets that spurred strong demand for its price discovery and ratings tools. The company has already said it will raise its dividend by 15%.
Elsewhere, the short squeezes continued to unwind in stocks such as GameStop and AMC Entertainment. GameStop (NYSE:GME) stock fell 14.7% to $51.20, its lowest since January 20th, when the short-squeeze spike was beginning. AMC Entertainment (NYSE:AMC) fell 12.5% to $5.42, a level that, excluding last week’s spike, would still be its highest since September.