Stocks in a wide range of sectors were trading lower on Thursday as investors focused on macroeconomic conditions and the Federal Reserve's ongoing battle against persistent high inflation, which has barely eased back from its near 40-year highs. Comments Thursday by a Fed official suggested that the central bank will continue to raise benchmark interest rates for the foreseeable future.

With that as a backdrop, many tech stocks lost ground. As of 12:31 p.m. ET, cybersecurity specialist Palo Alto Networks (NASDAQ: PANW) had slipped by 1.9%, cloud-native database provider MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB) was down by 3.5%, and data mining and business intelligence company Palantir (NYSE: PLTR) stock had fallen by 3.8%. At that point in the session, the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite were down by 0.6% and 0.5%, respectively.

There wasn't much in the way of company-specific news driving those tech companies' share price moves, but investors' fears that the Fed's fiscal tightening campaign might eventually cause a recession were a major catalyst helping to push the market lower.

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Source Fool.com