Late selling pushes Dow down 30

Updated: 6:58 p.m. ET

Stocks drifted lower today, and perhaps that was a good thing after Tuesday's big sell-off.

What bulls didn't want to see was a market that continued to slump badly. (Bears would probably disagree.)

And the major indexes held their own as investors wait for Friday's big jobs and unemployment report.

Minutes from the August Federal Reserve meeting portrayed a central bank that is seeing signs of a slow recovery.

• Check Bing for news on job trends

The Dow Jones industrials ($INDU) were down 30 points to 9,281 after slumping 186 points on Tuesday.

The Nasdaq Composite Index ($COMPX) slipped 2 points to 1,967, and the Standard & Poor's 500 Index ($INX) was off 3 points at 995.

Investors on Thursday will pay close attention to the weekly report on jobless claims and the monthly sales reports that many of the nation's largest retailers will offer.

But volume is likely to be light as traders sneak away for the long Labor Day weekend. U.S. financial markets will be closed on Monday.

Futures trading suggests the market will open down slightly. An issue: weaker-than-expected earnings from homebuilder Hovnanian (HOV).

Hovnanian shares were down 7.4% to $4.65 in regular trading and fell an additional 8% after hours to $4.25.

The Dow and S&P 500 suffered their fourth straight declines. The Nasdaq was down for the third day in a row.

The market was pulled lower in the last half-hour of trading today by selling in financial stocks. This bears watching because financials were the weak link in Tuesday's sell-off.

Goldman Sachs (GS) was off 1.1% to $158.54. JPMorgan Chase (JPM) was off 1.9% to $40.86. American International Group (AIG), which had been up nearly 11% earlier in the day, closed with a 5.4% gain to $37.95. The stock had fallen 20.6% on Tuesday.

The lower finish came as some tech stocks sported decent gains, including Cisco Systems (CSCO), Apple (AAPL) and Dell (DELL).

The Fed minutes show that the members of its rate-making body, the Federal Open Market Committee, are increasingly confident that their forecast of a modest recovery in the second half of the year will hold. In fact, the committee members "saw smaller downside risks" to their forecasts.

"Consumer spending appeared to be in the process of leveling out, and activity in a number of local housing markets had stabilized or even increased somewhat."

• Financials' troubles likely to linger

Plus, companies were bringing inventories into better alignment with their reduced sales, the minutes show, and production was stabilizing in many sectors -- albeit at low levels -- and beginning to rise in some.

But interest rates are likely to remain low. One reason: slow job growth.

"Long-term unemployment and permanent separations continued to rise," the minutes note. That raises a new challenge for the recovery: skill loss and a need for labor reallocation. That -- and the likelihood in business caution in new hiring -- could limit a jobs recovery as the economy begins to expand.

The Fed minutes came out after a report on private-sector employment was worse than economists had expected. The report from payroll processor Automated Data Processing showed a loss of 298,000 private-sector jobs in August, worse than the 246,000 analysts expected.

While the indexes were little changed, the tone of the market was negative.

Only eight of of the 30 Dow stocks were higher, along with 158 S&P 500 stocks, but 52 stocks in the Nasdaq-100 Index ($NDX.X), which tracks the biggest Nasdaq stocks, were higher. The index was off 2 points to 1,594.

Coca-Cola (KO) was the Dow leader, up 2.6% to $49.80. JPMorgan Chase was the laggard, just behind pharmaceutical giant Merck (MRK), down 1.9% to $30.81.

Rival Pfizer (PFE), which pleaded guilty to illegal marketing of its drug Bextra and will pay $2.3 billion in fines to settle related charges, was down 0.6% to $16.28.

Crude oil closed unchanged from Tuesday at $68.05 a barrel in New York. Energy shares were down slightly.

Shares of oil giant BP (BP) were up 4.1% to $52.53 in New York after announcing a huge oil find in the Gulf of Mexico southeast of Houston.

Gold, however, was up $22 an ounce to $978.50 in New York.

Orders for durable goods increased 5.1% in July, revised up from 4.9% estimated last week, but orders for nondurable goods fell 1.9%, which was the biggest decline since last December.

Nondefense capital-goods orders excluding aircraft, which are often called "core" orders, fell 0.3% in July after rising 3.8% in June.

Elizabeth Strott contributed to this report.