Most stocks are showing signs of topping out, and the chaos in Washington is still raging. As one analyst puts it, the risk/reward for buyers “isn’t great.”

The S&P 500 was 0.2% lower in afternoon trading. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 169 points, or 0.4%, as of 12:47 p.m. Eastern time

S&P 500, Dow and Nasdaq start in the green, shaking off back-to-back stronger-than-expected inflation data. They brace for Trump's reciprocal tariffs.

Rising instability among some of the biggest US stocks is driving a measure of single-stock “fragility” to record levels, with the market increasingly vulnerable to whipsaw patterns among clusters of shares such as occurred in the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s.

Wall Street edged back from an all-time high following mixed profit reports from big companies. The S&P 500 barely budged on Friday and slipped by a hair, a day after