US STOCKS-Wall St closes lower as shutdown worries overshadow vaccine hopes

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(Updates to market close)
By Stephen Culp
NEW YORK, Nov 18 (Reuters) - U.S. stocks lost substantial
ground at the close of a see-saw session on Wednesday as
investors weighed encouraging vaccine developments against
surging COVID-19 infections and lockdowns.
While all three major U.S. stock indexes closed in the red,
surging Tesla Inc TLSA.O shares helped cap the Nasdaq's loss.
"It's a confused market because portfolio managers don't
know which time period to focus on," said Tim Ghriskey, chief
investment strategist at Inverness Counsel in New York. "It's
this trade-off between the near term over the six to nine months
of continued spread of the virus and the period after that when
everyone's vaccinated and the virus is eradicated."
"There's a lot of issues out there but the decided bias has
been toward value and cyclicals," Ghriskey added.
Pfizer Inc PFE.N and its German partner BioNTech BNTX.O
revealed a 95% success rate at the conclusion of their COVID-19
vaccine trial, just days after Moderna Inc MRNA.O announced a
similar rate of success in preliminary data from its vaccine
candidate. Market participants have been greeting vaccine developments
with guarded optimism as global new infections soar to record
levels, raising the possibility of increased restrictions as the
economy struggles to recover from recession. The United States
remains the country worst affected by the pandemic. Unofficially, the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI fell
345.91 points, or 1.16%, to 29,437.44, the S&P 500 .SPX lost
41.81 points, or 1.16%, to 3,567.72 and the Nasdaq Composite
.IXIC dropped 97.74 points, or 0.82%, to 11,801.60.
Third-quarter reporting season has reached the final inning,
with 468 of the companies in the S&P 500 having reported. Of
those, 84.4% have surprised consensus to the upside, according
to Refinitiv.
Boeing Co BA.N initially provided the biggest lift to the
Dow after the Federal Aviation Commission green-lighted the
planemaker's grounded 737 MAX aircraft to resume flights, but
its shares later reversed course. Shares of Target Corp TGT.N advanced after handily beating
quarterly profit and sales estimates, which were boosted by a
155% jump in comparable digital sales. Lowe's Companies Inc LOW.N dropped after the home
improvement retailer forecast lower-than-expected holiday
quarter earnings as it beefs up its online business and doles
out employee bonuses to ease pandemic-related hardship.