Stocks slip on drop in oil and commodities

Stocks sagged Monday, pulled down by declines in energy and mining companies as prices for oil and other commodities fell. The market is heading into its final days of 2015.

At the close on Wall Street, the Dow had fallen 23.9 points, about 0.1 percent, to 17,528.3. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was down 4.5 points, about 0.2 percent, at 2,056.5. The Nasdaq composite lost 7.5 points, about 0.2 percent, to nearly 5,041.

The price of U.S. benchmark crude oil fell $1.37, about 3.6 percent to $36.73 a barrel in trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

Coming off a short week with the Christmas holiday, markets face another week shortened by the New Year’s Day holiday on Friday.

“We had such a big run over just a couple of days in the stock market and crude oil, so the market was due for a pullback,” analyst Matt Maley, an equity strategist at Miller Tabak & Co in Manhattan told Bloomberg News. “Obviously, China being down doesn’t help, either It’s a quiet and thin week.”