US stocks end mostly lower despite banking share rally

Wall Street stocks finished mostly lower on Monday, with petroleum-linked shares sliding on tumbling oil prices, although banking shares enjoyed large gains following solid earnings.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average finished up 0.2% at 25 064.36.

The broad-based S&P 500 declined 0.1% to 2 798.43, while the tech-rich Nasdaq Composite Index fell 0.3% to 7 805.72.

Investors are girding for a heavy week of corporate earnings and economic news, including two days of testimony from Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell beginning on Tuesday.

Most of the biggest events take place later in the week, with earnings reports from Goldman Sachs and others and several key housing industry data releases.

US retail sales rose 0.5% in June compared with May, matching analyst expectations.

Banking shares were buoyed after Bank of America became the latest company in the sector to report better-than-expected second quarter earnings behind lending growth and lower taxes.

Bank of America jumped 4.3%, while JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup both climbed close to 4%. Both JPMorgan and Citigroup had fallen on Friday after reporting solid earnings increases over the year-ago results.

But petroleum-linked companies tumbled on a big drop in oil prices. Exxon Mobil and Chevron both fell about 1%, while Apache shed 3.1%.