US close: Major indices end session lower

Wall Street stocks closed lower on Tuesday after seeing out the previous session at a record high.

At the close, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.56% at 29,783.35, while the S&P 500 was 0.48% weaker at 3,609.53 and the Nasdaq Composite saw out the session 0.21% softer at 11,899.34.

The Dow Jones closed 167.09 points higher on lower on Tuesday, cutting into losses recorded in the prior session after drugmaker Moderna gave the blue-chip index another shot in the arm when it revealed that its Covid-19 vaccine candidate was more than 94% effective, further raising expectations of a sharp economic recovery.

Positive headlines on the vaccine front couldn't come at a better time for markets, with more than 1.0m cases being confirmed across the US in less than a week, raising the country's total number of recorded cases to more than 11.0m, according to Johns Hopkins University.

However, despite the good news, the World Health Organization said that although the announcements of new potential effective vaccines for Covid-19 were positive, "many questions" around them remained.

The WHO welcomed Moderna's update but added that there was no time for complacency around the coronavirus and also highlighted that only very limited amounts of any vaccine would be available in the first half of 2021 for people other than priority health workers.

Also on the vaccine front, last weeks' market darling Pfizer announced it would begin trials in four US states for a delivery program for its Covid-19 vaccine.

On the macro front, retail sales increased less than expected in October, up just 0.3% month-on-month as an increase in new Covid-19 infections and declining household incomes saw Americans hide their wallets away a little more than anticipated, according to the Commerce Department.

Elsewhere, industrial production rose 1.1% in October, recovering much of the spring decline caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, according to the Federal Reserve, slightly better than the 1% analysts were expecting.

Still on data, business inventories increased slightly more than expected in September, rising 0.7% in September after gaining 0.3% in August, according to the Commerce Department.

Lastly, overall builder sentiment hit 90 on November's National Association of Home Builders' Wells Fargo housing market index, well above both the reading of 30 printed at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic and the 71 recorded at the same time a year earlier.

In corporate news, Home Depot was in the green after it easily beat expectations, while Walmart also topped earnings estimates as same-store sales rose in its last quarter.

Tesla shares accelerated after the electric carmaker announced it would be joining the S&P 500 in late December.