Stocks Fall for Second Day; GM Slumps

Updated from 4:31 p.m. EDT

Stocks in New York lost ground for a second session Tuesday as investors braced for the start of earnings season.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 186.29 points, or 2.3% to 7789.56, and the S&P 500 was down 19.93 points, or 2.4%, at 815.55. The Nasdaq shed 45.10 points, or 2.8%, to 1561.61.

On the Dow , Caterpillar(CAT) declined 5.9%, and General Electric (GE) was off by 4.8%. General Motors (GM) fared the worst, tumbling 11.9% to $2.

Comments from two prominent investors, George Soros and Marc Faber, that the market could see a pullback in the near term also weighed on the mood.

Alcoa(AA) was marking the start of earnings season with its first-quarter release after the close. The company reported a loss of 59 cents a share, about 3 cents worse than the estimate of analysts surveyed by Thomson Reuters. Shares declined 1.5% in the regular session.

Before that report, a unit of Rio Tinto(RTP) said that at current prices, 70% of the industry was operating at a financial loss. The company is making cuts in response to lagging demand in alumina and aluminum. Rio Tinto shares declined 4.6% to $126.67.

More broadly, this quarter will likely mark the seventh straight time the S&P 500 has recorded negative growth. That would be the longest negative era since Thomson Reuters began tracking the data in 1998.

"Expectations are very low, and nobody expects the first-quarter earnings to be good. Companies were very, very conservative in their expectations," says Marc Pado, U.S. market strategist Cantor Fitzgerald. One potential positive is that only a few warnings have come out recently, and that could mean things are going to be relatively in line with expectations, he says. "That's the best we can hope for."