S&P 500 Index opens modestly lower, tech shares underperform

• Wall Street's main indexes opened in the negative territory.
• Tech stocks underperform after the opening bell on Tuesday.
• Energy shares push higher ahead of Thursday's OPEC meeting.

Major equity indexes in the US opened modestly lower on Thursday as investors seem to be staying on the sidelines on the last day of the second quarter. As of writing, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.17% on the day at 34,325, the S&P 500 was losing 0.2% at 4,283 and the Nasdaq Composite was falling 0.15% at 14,551.

Earlier in the day, the data published by the Automatic Data Processing (ADP) Research Institute revealed that private sector employment increased by 692,000 in June. This reading followed May's print of 886,000 (revised from 978,000) and came in better than the market expectation of 600,000.

Among the 11 major S&P 500 sectors, the Communication Services and the Technology indexes are both down around 0.2% after the opening bell. On the other hand, the Energy Index is rising as investors are waiting for OPEC+ to announce its output strategy following Thursday's meeting.

S&P 500 chart (daily)