U.S. stocks retreated

U.S. stocks retreated, sending the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index lower for a second straight day, after disappointing service industries data overshadowed optimism over a bigger-than-forecast drop in jobless claims.

Equities fell as the Institute for Supply Management’s index of non-manufacturing industries, which account for almost 90 percent of the U.S. economy, decreased to 53.5 in April from 56 a month earlier. Jobless claims fell to 365,000 in the week ended April 28, a one-month low. The median forecast of economists called for 379,000 applications.

Bank of America (ВАС) declined 1.3 percent to $8.06. Hewlett- Packard (HPQ) dropped 1.2 percent to $24.94.

Green Mountain plunged 46 percent, the most ever, to $26.75. The company is seeing more competition from private- label capsules that fit into Keurig machines and from Starbucks Corp., which said it will begin selling its own single-serve brewer later this year. The company has introduced the Vue coffee machine to help combat rivals when the main patents for its K-Cups expire in September.

Target lost 1.9 percent to $56.89 as the earlier Easter holiday pulled sales into March and cooler weather cut mall traffic. Easter, which was April 8 this year after falling on April 24 in 2011, and high-school spring breaks that tend to occur around the same time pulled some shopping into March, Adrienne Tennant, a Washington-based analyst at Janney Montgomery Scott LLC, said in a report before results were announced. Cooler temperatures in the Northeast in late April also were a negative for sales of spring merchandise, she said.

Prudential Financial Inc. dropped 8 percent to $56.09. The second-biggest U.S. life insurer swung to a first-quarter loss as the value of the company’s derivative contracts fell.