US STOCKS-Wall Street slips after dismal Caterpillar, Boeing results

(For a live blog on the U.S. stock market, click LIVE/ or
type LIVE/ in a news window.)
* Boeing falls after reporting $3 bln Q2 loss
* Caterpillar slips on lower quarterly earnings
* Big Tech faces broad Justice Department antitrust probe
* Indexes down: Dow 0.48%, S&P 0.10%, Nasdaq 0.06%

(Updates to open)
By Amy Caren Daniel
July 24 (Reuters) - U.S. stocks fell on Wednesday after
bleak earnings from industrial bellwethers Caterpillar and
Boeing exacerbated concerns of a slowing global economy that
have roiled financial markets this year.
Caterpillar Inc CAT.N , whose large exposure to China makes
it a proxy for the global impact of trade tensions, dropped 5.8%
after reporting a fall in quarterly earnings on cooling demand
for construction machines in Asia. The world's largest planemaker BA.N matched that with its
biggest loss in decades on the back of this year's grounding of
its best-selling 737 MAX planes after two deadly crashes.
Boeing's shares fell 1.2%. Two weeks into the guts of an earnings season for which
investors have already dialed down expectations, the
manufacturing firms' results came on the same day as a grim set
of forward-looking surveys on the euro zone economy.
"Caterpillar's results show that there is weakness in the
Asia Pacific region, and if there is a slowdown there, where is
the next pocket of slowdown, and people could start
extrapolating from that," said Andre Bakhos, managing director
at New Vines Capital LLC in Bernardsville, New Jersey.
"Caterpillar's earnings are more important than Boeing,
because Boeing's issues are more company specific."
The bleak earnings of the industrial heavyweights resulted
in the blue-chip Dow index .DJI falling more than the S&P 500
.SPX and Nasdaq .IXIC indexes.
Nearly 80% of the 104 S&P 500 companies to report so far
have topped earnings expectations, and overall profits are
expected to rise about 1%, according to Refinitiv, improving
from a small decline estimated previously.
Shares of Texas Instruments Inc TXN.O jumped 7% and helped
lift the Philadelphia chip index .SOX by 1.7%, after the
company said a global slowdown in microchip demand would not be
as long as feared as it posted quarterly profit and revenue that
beat estimates. At 9:43 a.m. ET, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down
131.66 points, or 0.48%, at 27,217.53, the S&P 500 was down 2.97
points, or 0.10%, at 3,002.50. The Nasdaq Composite was down
5.07 points, or 0.06%, at 8,246.33.
Sentiment, however, remains shaky and other corporate news,
including the announcement of a broad antitrust investigation by
the U.S. Justice Department into the tech sector, fed into the
losses.
The DoJ did not identify specific companies, but the terms
of the review pointed to Alphabet Inc GOOGL.O , Amazon.com Inc
AMZN.O and Facebook Inc FB.O . Shares of all three fell about
1% and weighed the most on indexes.
Facebook, which reports earnings later on Wednesday, was
also the subject of a pair of settlements announced by
regulators on privacy issues that included fines of more than $5
billion, again well-flagged previously. Advancing issues outnumbered decliners by a 1.32-to-1 ratio
on the NYSE and by a 1.04-to-1 ratio on the Nasdaq.
The S&P index recorded 19 new 52-week highs and no new low,
while the Nasdaq recorded 29 new highs and 42 new lows.