NEW YORK-A two-day ral­ly in the stock mar­ket came to an end yes­ter­day af­ter­noon when an ac­count of the Fed­er­al Re­serve's last meet­ing re­vealed a split be­tween bank of­fi­cials over how long the Fed should keep buy­ing bonds to sup­port the econ­o­my.

The Dow Jones in­dus­tri­al av­er­age and the Stan­dard & Poor's 500 in­dex tread­ed wa­ter for much of the day, then slid in­to the red around 2 p.m. East­ern, af­ter the Fed re­leased the min­utes from its De­cem­ber meet­ing.

The Dow end­ed with a loss of 21.19 points, or 0.2 per cent, at 13,391.36.

The S&P 500 lost 3.05 points to 1,459.37 and the Nas­daq com­pos­ite fell 11.70 to 3,100.57. At last month's meet­ing of the Fed­er­al Re­serve's pol­i­cy-mak­ing com­mit­tee, the cen­tral bank pledged to buy US$85 bil­lion of Trea­surys and mort­gage-backed bonds and al­so keep a bench­mark in­ter­est rate near ze­ro un­til the un­em­ploy­ment rates drops be­low 6.5 per cent.

On Thurs­day, the min­utes from that meet­ing showed Fed of­fi­cials were di­vid­ed over the bond pur­chas­es. Some of its 12 vot­ing mem­bers thought they should con­tin­ue through this year, while an­oth­er group thought they should be slowed or stopped much ear­li­er. Just "a few" mem­bers saw no need for a time frame, ac­cord­ing to the min­utes.

The stock mar­ket opened on a weak note af­ter re­tail­ers re­port­ed mixed hol­i­day sales and as the prospect of a new bud­get bat­tle in Con­gress loomed. Unit­ed­Health Group led the Dow low­er. The in­sur­ance gi­ant's stock fell US$2.55 to US$51.99 af­ter an­a­lysts at Deutsche Bank and oth­er firms cut their rat­ings on the stock.