US STOCKS-Wall St slips on surprise rise in jobless claims, tech slide

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* Declines in big tech-related firms pressure Nasdaq
* Walmart slides as lackluster outlook overshadows upbeat Q4
sales
* Facebook shares slip following news blackout move in
Australia
* Indexes down: Dow 0.85%, S&P 0.83%, Nasdaq 1.10%

(Updates price action to open)
By Devik Jain and Shreyashi Sanyal
Feb 18 (Reuters) - Wall Street's main indexes fell on
Thursday as investors resumed a shift out of big
technology-related firms, while an unexpected rise in weekly
jobless claims pointed to a fragile recovery in the labor
market.
The Labor Department's report showed initial claims for
state unemployment benefits were 861,000 last week, compared
with 848,000 in the prior week, partly due to potential claims
related to the temporary closure of automobile plants due to a
global semiconductor chip shortage. "The one part of the economy that has remained disappointing
is clearly the employment picture," said Ryan Detrick, chief
market strategist at LPL Financial in Charlotte, North Carolina.
U.S. stock indexes hit record highs at the beginning of the
week but gradually retreated following a rise in treasury bond
yields, which led to fears of higher inflation. US/
Those concerns have pushed investors to book profit on
stocks with high valuation in the S&P 500 technology .SPLRCT
and communications services .SPLRCL sectors, which have
underpinned a 76% rise in the benchmark index .SPX since its
March 2020 lows. Shares of Apple Inc AAPL.O , Microsoft Corp MSFT.O ,
Amazon.com Inc AMZN.O , Tesla Inc TSLA.O and Alphabet Inc
GOOGL.O were down between 0.8% and 2.0%.
"A steady slow increase may not necessarily disrupt the
uptrend in equities but will likely force rotation from highly
priced stocks, typically in the tech sector, to more reasonably
priced cyclical ones," said Hussein Sayed, chief market
strategist at FXTM.
Facebook Inc FB.O shares slipped 1.3% as Wall Street
assessed the wider ramifications of its move to block all news
content in Australia. Only the defensive utilities sector .SPLRCU was in the
positive territory in early trading, out of the 11 major S&P 500
sectors.
Walmart Inc WMT.N slid 5.9% after the world's largest
retailer missed quarterly profit estimates and predicted fiscal
2022 net sales to rise in low single digits.
At 9:41 a.m. ET the Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI was
down 267.75 points, or 0.85%, at 31,345.27, the S&P 500 .SPX
was down 32.45 points, or 0.83%, at 3,898.88 and the Nasdaq
Composite .IXIC was down 153.32 points, or 1.10%, at
13,812.17.
Marriott International Inc MAR.O slipped 1.9% after
reporting a quarterly loss as the world's largest hotel chain's
bookings declined due to pandemic-induced travel restrictions.
Declining issues outnumbered advancers for a 2.59-to-1 ratio
on the NYSE and for a 2.86-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.
The S&P index recorded six new 52-week highs and no new low,
while the Nasdaq recorded 37 new highs and three new lows.