Brendan Hoffman / REUTERS
Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange Tuesday morning.
By NBC News wire services
Updated at 4:02 p.m. ET: Stocks fell sharply Tuesday as earnings from a host of large multinational companies and a Moody's credit rating downgrade of several regions in Spain triggered concerns about the slowing global economy.
The Dow Jones industrial average closed the day down 243 points, touching its lowest level in seven weeks and on track for its first October loss since 2008. At the lows of the day the Dow was off as much as 262 points.
J.J. Kinahan, TD Ameritrade?s chief derivatives strategist, said the market?s decline is primarily driven by worries about Spain and the latest earnings news. Revenue is down for more than 50 percent of the companies reporting financial results, he added.
?That?s high,? Kinahan said. ?Clearly people, and companies, are not spending at a pace we would like to see.?
United Technologies Corp reported a 3.3 percent decline in third-quarter earnings and cut its sales forecast for the year, citing weak demand from airlines and an uncertain economy.
Fellow Dow Jones Industrial Average component DuPont reported a lower-than-expected quarterly profit on Tuesday and announced 1,500 job cuts as part of a cost savings program designed to offset falling sales around the world. Its shares tumbled.
3M fell after the diversified U.S. manufacturer reported a 6.7 percent rise in third-quarter profit, but the company cut its profit forecast for the full year as acquisition costs and a strengthening dollar hurt margins.
"The writing has been on the wall for a while, it's a very tough environment, it's tough to generate new revenues so it shouldn't be too big a surprise we are having people miss on that front," said Peter Jankovskis, co-chief investment officer at OakBrook Investments LLC in Lisle, Illinois.
Adding to the global economic concerns was a fall in Spanish bond prices after Moody's downgraded five of the country's regions including economically important but deeply indebted Catalonia.
"We had gone through a period starting with (European Central Bank President) Draghi's announcement from the ECB that he would stand behind the sovereign debt where Spain situation had kind of faded from people's view and it's bubbling up again," Jankovskis said.
United Parcel Service Inc reported a lower quarterly profit on Tuesday, citing slowing global trade, and said there was "some uncertainty" about the strength of the coming holiday season.
According to Thomson Reuters data, 33 S&P 500 companies are scheduled to post earnings on Tuesday. Of the 123 S&P 500 companies that have reported earnings through Monday morning, 60.2 percent have topped analysts' expectations, shy of the 62 percent average since 1994 and below the 67 percent average over the past four quarters.
Overall earnings for S&P500 stock index companies are expected to fall 2.4 percent in the third quarter from a year ago. Even more disconcerting to investors, top-line expectations have been more discouraging, with 61 percent of companies having missed revenue expectations.
Apple made its biggest product move on Tuesday since the iPad's debut two years ago, launching a smaller, cheaper tablet into a market staked out by Amazon.com Inc and Google Inc.
Whirlpool Corp gained after reporting a higher-than-expected quarterly profit, helped by price increases and tight cost controls, and the world's largest appliance maker raised its earnings outlook for the year.
RadioShack Corp plunged after the consumer electronics chain reported a much wider-than-expected quarterly loss, hurt by weak margins in its smartphone business.
The U.S. Federal Reserve's policy committee is also set to begin the first day of a two-day meeting on interest rate policy on Tuesday. The Federal Open Market Committee is likely to hold off from taking fresh steps at the meeting, opting to review the impact of the significant action it took last month and keep a low profile in its last gathering before the November 6 general election.
Reuters contributed to this report.
Half of the market's major sell-off today is due to six stocks ? Exxon, Chevron, DuPont, 3M, CAT and IBM. Gordon Charlop, of Rosenblatt Securities weighs in on what's causing the DOW to take it's biggest dip since June.
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