Markets trend lower ahead of close, financial stocks manage to maintain gains

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre looks at how markets are faring in the final hour of trading.

Video Transcript

JARED BLIKRE: Let's take a look at the markets overall. This is, by the way, the third day of the Santa Claus rally, so I'm going to show you some three-day charts of the Dow, which is down today by about 2/3 of a percent, basically breakeven over the last three days. Here's the NASDAQ. It's down 1% today, or 2% plus over the last three days, and the S&P 500 down just marginally, just a little bit more than half a percent.

But usually what happens this time of year is nothing really matters. You have a market meltup. You have some kind of drift. And headlines don't seem to matter as much, but what's happening this year is all the fringe sectors, all those sectors that got beaten down the most this year, those are getting hammered yet again. So we can see today energy is on the downside, down over 1 and 1/2%, followed by communication services and tech. All of those down more than 1%.

And a lot of that action is not only in the mega caps. Let's take a look at those first, but you can see lots and lots of red here. I guess a couple of standouts, we've got Tesla. Finally, that's up about 2%, stopping-- what is that-- a seven or eight-day slide here. Got to keep tabs on that. But just checking in on some of the market leaders, lots of red. And the dark red down there stands out as well. KWEB, we've got to take a look at these Chinese internet stocks because those have taken a major drubbing. However, over the last month, those are some of the names that have gotten a lot of love.

So back with my analysis on what is getting-- what got hammered this year is getting hammered even more. Just take a look at what's happened with the meme stocks. This is today. Here is the last five days. Coinbase down 7%. Rocket Company is down 12%. We have AMC down as well, GameStop, some of those OG names. My point is, Seana, the fringe markets here are seeing no investor love, and this is antithetical to what we see this time of year usually. So all of this portends, if we don't get that Santa Claus rally, that portends a negative setup for the following year. It doesn't it has to come true, but usually this time of year, we're just sipping our coffee and reading the paper.

SEANA SMITH: I know. Investors really holding out hope. Maybe the final hour of trading today in the final two trading days of the year, maybe we'll see some of that momentum turn, just to be a little bit optimistic here.