NEW YORK, July 9 (Xinhua) -- U.S. stocks ended mixed on Tuesday, as Wall Street waited for the upcoming monetary policy testimony of U.S. Federal Reserve's head to the U.S. Congress, in efforts to search for more signals for further rate cut moves.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 22.65 points, or 0.08 percent, to 26,783.49. The S&P 500 was up 3.68 points, or 0.12 percent, to 2,979.63. The Nasdaq Composite Index was up 43.35 points, or 0.54 percent, to 8,141.73.
Shares of Netflix rose 1 percent, after the U.S. video streaming service announced a record high viewership of season 3 of its original show "Stranger Things."
Shares of 3M fell nearly 2.1 percent, as Canadian investment bank RBC Capital Markets downgraded the company's stock to "sector perform" from "outperform," due to "eroding" reputation of the U.S. conglomerate as a "defensive, high-quality industrial."
Eight of the 11 primary S&P 500 sectors traded higher around market close, with the real estate sector up over 0.6 percent, leading the gainers.
Investors have looked ahead to the semiannual testimony of Fed Chairman Jerome Powell over the next two days. Powell is scheduled to testify in front of the House Financial Services Committee on Wednesday.
The market has priced in a potential rate cut by the Fed at its policy meeting on July 30-31. Yet the robust jobs report released on July 5 has scaled down expectations on more aggressive interest rate cuts.
The testimony is expected to shed more light on how the central bank will set its easing steps later this month.
On the economic front, U.S. job openings slightly declined to a seasonally adjusted 7.32 million on the last business day of May month over month, said the Labor Department on Tuesday.
The job openings rate was 4.6 percent, down from the 4.7 percent in April. Job openings decreased in a number of industries with the largest decreases in construction, transportation, warehousing, and utilities, as well as real estate and rental and leasing. Enditem
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