US stocks fall slightly

Wall Street gave up a moderate gain in late trading and closed marginally lower today after the Federal Reserve and other central banks added more cash to their banking systems, helping investors set aside some concerns about credit tightness.

The New York Fed, which carries out the central bank’s market operation, minutes after the opening bell announced two billion dollars in overnight repurchase agreements.

The Fed’s “repo” follows a move by the Bank of Japan to put five billion dollars into the markets and an addition by the European Central Bank of 65.3 billion dollars; the ECB added more than 200 billion dollars last week. The moves, following similar injections by the Fed last week, appeared to placate Wall Street for now and allowed it to look ahead to a week of fresh economic data. Since Thursday, the Fed has added 62 billion dollars in liquidity.

Today’s injection, however, was smaller than normal, perhaps reassuring some investors that the central bank doesn’t yet feel the need to pump more liquidity into the market. The last time the Fed repurchased as little as two billion dollars in one day was on Wednesday, April 18. It made a one-day repo of 1.5 billion dollars on May 10, but that was preceded by a separate one-day repo of five billion dollars earlier that same day.

The central bank moves seem to be calming a market that has been torn by volatility for weeks. But Ryan Detrick, senior technical strategist for Schaeffer’s Investment Research, said trading today was very tepid. In fact, the Dow’s decline was a sign that investors remain nervous.

That the markets gave up their gains wasn’t surprising given how volatile trading has been.

“We got off to a good start in the morning, but people are still kind of on edge here and are unwilling to jump in and do a lot of buying,” he said. “There’s so much worry out there about the next shoe to drop.”

According to preliminary calculations, the Dow Jones industrial average fell 3.01, or 0.02%, to 13,236.53.

Broader stock indicators also rose. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 0.72, or 0.05%, to 1,452.92, and the Nasdaq composite index retreated 2.65, or 0.10%, to 2,542.24.