Stocks mixed in a choppy intraday session, health care and consumer staples stay in the green

Yahoo Finance markets reporter Jared Blikre observes movements in the stock and bond markets heading into the close, as well as volatility and intraday sector losses.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Let's take a look here at the markets because they have just under an hour to go until the closing bell. And you're looking at a mixed picture. The Dow barely holding onto gains as we get ready to wrap up the first half of the year. S&P and NASDAQ in the red. The NASDAQ off just about 3/10 of a percent. Jared Blikre standing by with a closer look at some of these movers in the final hour. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. Pretty choppy day here. We got some comments by Powell earlier. You can see the Dow is the only one of the majors in the green. Also the Russell 2000 in the red. But that is a lot of chop for the day.

Not going to make anything too big of it. Here's the NASDAQ. Want to show that as well. Also a lot of chop in the Russell 2000. That has been trending down. That was also leading prior in the rally. So we might want to take note of this.

Now let's get to a two-month chart of the S&P 500. And we can see we have now retraced exactly half of these gains. And that's the level at which some long buyers might step in. And so good news is we had them breach that yet, but if we get a little bit lower, we could be heading down to test these lows from last week, and that would be another very short lived rally, kind of par for the course that we've been seeing here.

Also want to take a look at volatility. Here is the VIX, slightly elevated. But also the real volatility has been in the rates market. And here we're seeing the B of A MOVE index, and this is as of yesterday's close. This has been heading higher. So if this is breaking the trend, which has been short term down, that would mean probably more trouble for equities.

Finally, I want to take a look at the bond market here. The 10-year T note yield down 10 basis points. That is a very big move. The five-year also moving down about 10 basis points. And the 30, that is down nine basis points.

Now we are about to wrap the first half of the year, the worst one for the NASDAQ in history. What happens in the second half? I'm going to go over that tomorrow morning. But the results are not that good. You have to go back to 2008. That was not a good one. 2002, tech bubble bursting, and that was not a good one.

Again, all the details tomorrow morning. For today, we have health care and staples, those are in the lead. Only things in the green. And that is a very defensive set up. Energy taking a downdraft for about 3% to the downside, guys.