*By Kristen Lee*
U.S. stocks accelerated losses at the end of the day Wednesday, with the Dow dropping 600 points and the Nasdaq on pace for its biggest monthly drop in a decade.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the day down 608 points, the S&P lost more than 3 percent, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost nearly 4.5 percent.
The sell-off was driven in part by a Commerce Department report that home sales plunged 5.5 percent in September, which rattled investors who expected only a slight decline.
Tech stocks especially weighed on markets. Netflix ($NFLX) and chipmaker Nvidia ($NVDA) were both down nearly 10 percent, Facebook ($FB), down nearly 6 percent, and Google parent Alphabet ($GOOGL), down more than 5 percent.
A majority of Americans support higher pay for auto workers who are on strike against Detroit's Big Three carmakers, although approval of the workers' other demands is more mixed, according to a poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
The ongoing United Auto Workers strike expanded Thursday in a major blow to Ford as the union ordered 8700 workers to walk off the job at the automaker giant's largest plant.
A retired bank official testified that former president Donald Trump obtained hundreds of millions of dollars in loans based on financial statements that have since been deemed fraudulent.
