STOCKS FALL, DOW LOSES 110: Here's What You Need To Know

REUTERS/Ray Stubblebine

Stocks fell for the second straight day as the Dow lost 115 points and the Nasdaq lost nearly 1%. The situation in Iraq weighed on markets, and both crude oil and gold traded higher.

First, the scoreboard:

Dow: 16,739.65, -110.3, 0.6%
S&P 500: 1,930.35, -13.5, 0.7%
Nasdaq: 4,296.57, -35.4, -0.8%

And now, the top stories of the day:

• Retail sales for May grew 0.3%, coming in shy of the 0.6% that economists had been expecting. April sales, however, were revised up to having grown 0.5% in the month, as compared to the 0.1% that had been previously reported. Chris Rupkey, Chief Financial Economist at Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi UFJ said it was this report, and the April revision, indicates the retail sales for the quarter are up 8.1%. Rupkey: "Consumers have not bought this much from your friendly neighborhood retailer or from over the internet up in the clouds since early 2012. Strongest quarterly retail sales in two years. Put that in the headline."
• Weekly jobless claims grew to 317,000, topping expectations for 310,000 and higher than last week's revised total of 313,000. Continuing claims also climbed to 2,614,000, more than was expected. "In one line: Seasonal quirk explains the increase; expect a clear drop next week," Pantheon Macro's Ian Shepherdson said of the report. "The seasonal quirk should reverse next week, pushing claims down towards the 300K mark. The underlying trend in claims is still falling, albeit quite slowly, but the decline already recorded this year is more thn enough to suggest that payroll gains of 225K plus ought to be sustainable, other things being equal."
• Business inventories grew 0.6%, topping expectations for a 0.4% increase. Following the report, Cooper Howes at Barclays said U.S. GDP for the second quarter is now tracking to 3% growth. Howes also noted that this report did not change his first quarter GDP expectations for -1.3%.
• The situation in Iraq continued to destabilize, prompting President Obama to say that he would consider doing "anything" to respond to gains made by militant extremists in Iraq over the past few days. The Wall Street Journal also reported that Iran is deploying Revolutionary Guard forces to fight in Iraq.
• Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced on the company's blog that its patents are now available for fair use. Musk said that his company's main competition is not other electric car manufacturers, but all cars that are running on gasoline. On a conference call, Musk also said if a company is relying on its patents, "it means they're not innovating... You should be innovating so fast that you're invalidating your prior patents."
• Twitter COO Ali Rowghani left the company. Rowghani was initially hired as the company's CFO, but last year was given the responsibility of leader user growth, which has been lackluster.
• Yoga apparel company lululemon saw shares fall 15% after cutting its full year outlook and reporting a drop in profit. The company also announced that its CFO, John Currie, would retire after seven years with the company.
• A burrito company in Britain named Chilango is now offering investors a bond that not only pays an 8% interest rate semi-annually, but offers investors of more than £10,000 a free burrito each week for the duration of the note.

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