By Devik Jain

(Reuters] – Monday’s open saw a drop in the shares of mega-cap technology companies and a decline in Nvidia stock (NASDAQ:), which led to declines among chipmakers. They were supported however by a rise economic-sensitive stocks.

Nvidia Corp Premarket trading saw a 3.6% drop, and Friday’s 4.5% decline was due to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filing suit to stop its $80 billion purchase of British chip technology provider Arm.

EU antitrust regulators suspended temporarily their investigation into this takeover transaction while they wait for additional information.

Peers Qualcomm, Inc. and Advanced Micro Devices (NASDAQ) Inc. and Heavyweight Growth Stocks Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ), Google-owner Alphabet NASDAQ (NASDAQ) Inc Meta Platforms Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ) Inc and Tesla (NASDAQ) Inc dropped between 0.5% & 2.1%

Occidental Petroleum, up 1.7%, was the leader among energy stocks following oil price movements. [O/R]

Wells Fargo With a 1.2% increase in its share, the largest gainer of big lenders was (NYSE)

As of Sunday, the Omicron coronavirus variant had spread to approximately one-third of U.S. States. CNN spoke with Dr. Anthony Fauci who is the U.S.’s top infectious disease expert. He said that “it doesn’t look like it has a high degree of severity.”

Goldman Sachs (NYSE 🙂 cut Saturday its forecast for U.S. growth to 3.8% in 2022. This was due to uncertainty and risks around the new variant.

Wall Street’s main indexes saw weekly drops on Friday. They swung wildly after investors digested Omicron News and Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell’shawkish remarks about a faster taper to combat surging inflation.

Powell’s comments also encouraged market participants to place bets for early interest rates hikes next year. They are shifting to value names that are economy-linked from tech-heavy stocks in anticipation of them performing better in an environment where monetary policy is tightening.

The value index dropped 0.9% last week but was still higher than its growth counterpart (which fell 1.5%).

6.50 AM ET ET Dow e-minis increased 198 points (or 0.57%) and dropped 55.75 points (or 0.35%).

Following a mixed job report last week the Fed will focus its attention on Friday’s consumer price index release and core inflation readings to get clues as to the direction of its policy decisions at the December meeting.

Kohl’s Corp (NYSE) rose 2.7% following Engine Capital LP, a hedge fund that said it was pushing Kohl’s department store chain to sell the business or seperate its ecommerce division in order to increase its stock price.