YAHOO [BRIEFING.COM]: Monday made for a rather boring day for stocks. There wasn't any market-moving news and the major indices spent the entire session trading with relatively modest weakness.

At their session lows, stocks were down roughly 1%. The downturn came after a choppy start and a couple of failed attempts to pare losses in the early going. Stocks did manage to retrace the downturn into the close, though.

McDonald's (MCD 56.27, +1.07) provided leadership to blue chips after reporting another monthly increase in global sales. However, the announcement did little for the overall market.

Health care stocks finished the session with some of the best gains. Health care stocks advanced nearly 0.8%. The sector drew support from a broad range of industry players, though Eli Lilly (LLY 33.83, -1.06) lagged after Reuters reported that analysts at Goldman Sachs placed the stock on the Americas Conviction Sell List.

Utilities (+0.2%), consumer staples stocks (+0.2%), and energy stocks (+0.3%) also made gains. The first two sectors put together their advance late in the session, but energy stocks spent the majority of the session in higher ground even as oil prices gyrated. Crude oil futures finished 0.4% lower at $70.62 per barrel.

Gold prices contended with considerable selling pressure for the entire session. They dropped 1.3% to settle at $946.90 per ounce. General weakness among commodity prices weighed on basic materials stocks for the entire session. In turn, the materials sector fell 1.6%, worse than any other major sector in the S&P 500.

Trading volume was light this session. Hardly 1 billion shares exchanged hands on the NYSE. That's the fewest in two weeks and considerably below the near 1.5 billion that have been averaged during the last 200 sessions.DJ30 -32.12 NASDAQ -8.01 NQ100 -0.6% R2K -0.1% SP400 -0.7% SP500 -3.38 NASDAQ Adv/Vol/Dec 1285/1.86 bln/1386 NYSE Adv/Vol/Dec 1444/1.09 bln/1595