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STORY: U.S. stocks ended lower on Monday, as Wall Street approached the half-way point of a year in which the equity markets have been slammed by worries over inflation and tightening policy from the Federal Reserve.

Analyst David Trainer, CEO of New Constructs, said investors seem less and less convinced the Fed can avoid tipping the economy into recession as it raises rates.

"The chances of a recession, it's tough. You know, the Fed is going to do its best to walk the fine line in reining in inflation without trying to do too much demand destruction and cause a recession. A lot of people don't believe that they can walk that fine line, that they're going to have to do one or the other, raise rates a lot or cause a recession. And I think when faced with those two options, the Fed is going to go with recession because raising rates too much just makes paying the debt service on the national debt a little bit too expensive."

The Dow finished down 0.20%. The S&P 500 ended down 0.30%, while the Nasdaq lost 0.72%.

All three indexes are on course to notch two straight quarterly declines for the first time since 2015.

Weakness in interest rate sensitive tech giants such as Amazon.com, Alphabet and Microsoft weighed on the S&P 500.

Shares of retail trading platform Robinhood Markets surged 14% after a media report said crypto exchange FTX is exploring whether it might be able to acquire Robinhood.

And, speaking of crypto, shares of Coinbase Global fell more than 10% after Goldman Sachs downgraded its shares from "buy" to "sell."