The bulls were in charge early Thursday, but an apparent setback in Greece's debt crisis at midday sent the indexes tumbling.
Strong early gains stalled in mid-afternoon trade, first cutting the froth off the gains and then turning the indexes to losses on all but the Dow.
The NYSE composite slid 0.3%. The S&P 500 lost just under 0.2%. The Nasdaq edged down 0.1% and the Dow rose fractionally.
Volume was up on both major exchanges.
For the third time in the past five sessions, the market suffered distribution. The NYSE composite added another day of higher-volume losses to its count. The other indexes' losses were meager.
Still, the day's stalling action was bearish, even for the indexes that escaped outright distribution.
More days of institutional selling over the next couple of weeks could put the market's uptrend in question.
Strong earnings reports from Best Buy (BBY) and a sunny outlook from Qualcomm (QCOM) drove the early bullish action. Stocks also found help from better-than-expected jobless claims numbers and a report that France and Germany reached an agreement on a bailout for Greece.
The dollar weakened on the Greece news, boosting stocks.
But the report of a French-German agreement was undercut when European Central Bank President Jean-Claude Trichet said an IMF role in the bailout would be a bad precedent. That revived anxieties about the debt crisis. The dollar began to rise at midsession after Trichet's comment, and stocks started to struggle.
It was mostly down from there.
Some top-rated stocks notched sizable gains, but the technical action was flawed. Many gapped up but then finished low in the day's range. Some broke out and then slid underneath their buy points. A few held most of their gains.
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