Wall Street finally woke up on Tuesday, but riskier stocks were sending the major indexes to session lows.

The Dow was briefly down more than 300 points and was most recently down 280 points, or 0.6%, with less than an hour to go in the session. The S&P 500 was down 0.8%. The Nasdaq Composite was down 0.9%.

Stocks were trading sideways all day, but selling accelerated after the S&P fell below the narrow range it was trading within for much of the session.