LONDON (ShareCast) - (ShareCast News) - Wall Street is trading slightly lower, but well-off its intra-day lows, following the release of stronger than expected consumer price inflation and retail sales data for October and amid lingering concerns about the progress being made by the White House on tax reforms.
At 1629 GMT, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down by 0.34% or 78.62 points at 23,331.17, alongside a dip of 0.31% for the S&P 500 to 2,570.85 while the Nasdaq Composite was lower by 0.28% or 18.58 points to 6,719.21.

From a sector standpoint, the weakest areas of the market were Non-ferrous metals (-4.37%), Oil equipment (-2.78%) and Coal (-2.48%).

In parallel, West Texas Intermediate crude oil futures were paring earlier losses to trade down by 0.6% to $55.37 a barrel on the ICE even after the US Department reported a 1.9m barrel build (consensus: -2.2m) in US stockpiles last week.

IG analyst Joshua Mahony said: "The deterioration in global stocks clearly has a footing in last week's Senate announcement that we may not see a US corporate tax cut until 2019. However, the worst may not be over yet. With Senate Majority leader Mitch McConnell hoping to add a repeal of the 'individual mandate' into the bill as a way to undermine Obamacare, the pathway to tax reform just got more complicated."

On the data front, total US retail sales volumes increased by 0.2% month-on-month in October to reach $486.6bn, according to the Department of Commerce (consensus: 0.1%), alongside upwards revisions to data for the previous month.

In parallel, the Department of Labor said that 'core' consumer price gains accelerated to a 1.8% pace year-on-year last month from a 1.7% clip in September.

Commenting on the data, Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics said: "The y/y rate nudged up to 1.8% from 1.7%; it will remain close to this rate until March, the anniversary of the first of the soft numbers this year. At that point, the y/y rate will start to rise rapidly, and will be 2.5%-plus by late summer.

"The three-month annualized rate is now 2.4%, up from a low of zero in May. The "transitory" and "idiosyncratic" factors are fading."

Be that as it may, the yield on the benchmark 10-year US Treasury note was down by four basis points to 2.33%.

In corporate news, investors were digesting date showing that Soros Fund Management hived-off large numbers of shares in tech giants Facebook, Apple, Snap and Twitter.

Discount store Target - which is in the throes of a turnaround plan - was also in focus after it posted a bigger-than-expected jump in quarterly same-store sales.

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