Shares of the company have nosedived as it dealt with a crisis involving one of its best-sellers
by Reade Pickert and Carolina Wilson
Boeing Co. shares are in free fall after this weekend’s deadly air crash, and trading in exchange-traded funds exposed to the manufacturing giant has gone through the roof.
The SPDR Dow Jones Industrial Average ETF Trust, traded as DIA, saw more than four times its average pre-session volume as its Boeing exposure spooked investors. Over 265,000 shares of the US$21.1 billion fund traded before 9:30 a.m. in New York, the most since Jan. 30. XLI tracks the gauge of U.S. blue-chip stocks, of which Boeing is the heaviest weighting with 11 percent.
About 83,000 shares of the US$10.4 billion Industrial Select Sector SPDR Fund, ticker XLI, exchanged hands before stock markets opened in New York Monday. That’s more than nine times the average pre-session volume over the past year, and the most since Dec. 24. The fund had traded close to 70 percent of its average daily volume for the past year as of 1 p.m.
Boeing sank as much as 13 percent Monday as the company dealt with the fallout of a crash Sunday involving one of its 737 Max jetliners. The disaster -- the second involving this model -- has prompted some airlines to ground the best-selling plane. The model generates almost one-third of the manufacturer’s operating profit.
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