The post-election stock boom waned as worries about interest rates increased.

As the post-election surge waned and investors worried about the direction of interest rates, stocks fell on Friday.

At 43,444.99., the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 305.87 points, or 0.70%. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 2.24% to 18,680.12, while the S&P 500 dropped 1.32% to end at 5,870.62.

The 30-stock Dow and the larger S&P 500 were affected by declines in pharmaceutical equities, with Moderna down 7.3% and Amgen down around 4.2%.

On Thursday, President-elect Donald Trump announced his intention to appoint Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a vaccine skeptic, to head the Department of Health and Human Services. The SPDR S&P Biotech ETF (XBI) had its worst week since 2020, plunging more than 5%.

The S&P 500’s information technology sector had the poorest performance, falling more than 2% as Microsoft, Nvidia, MetaPlatforms, and Alphabet all faltered.

With a 3% increase in shares of the electric vehicle behemoth and so-called “Trump Trade,” Tesla was a rare outlier among its Magnificent Seven rivals.

Kristy Akullian, head of BlackRock’s iShares investment strategy, Americas, stated, “We believe the macro backdrop still bodes well for risk assets, but in the near term we should expect some micro volatility, particularly around potential policy shifts under a new administration.” “We anticipate that the U.S. equity market will continue to rise, but we don’t anticipate that the rise will be linear.”

Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, recently stated on Thursday that the central bank was not “in a hurry” to lower interest rates, which caused traders to take issue. He pointed out that because of the economy’s robust growth, officials will have more time to consider how much to lower interest rates. A rate decrease next month isn’t a given, Boston Fed President Susan Collins told The Wall Street Journal, adding to the cautious tone.

The 0.4% increase in October retail sales figures released on Friday was somewhat better than the 0.3% prediction made by Dow Jones experts. This conclusion comes after a consumer inflation data released in October that was consistent with forecasts from experts.

Since Trump’s triumph in the polls, the main averages had been coasting on a post-election bounce; on Monday, the three indexes reached new highs, but the upward impetus has been waning. The Nasdaq Composite fell almost 3.2%, while the S&P 500 reported a 2.1% weekly loss. The Dow’s 30-stock index dropped 1.2% during that time.