NEW YORK (AP) — Wall Street pulled back yesterday after new signs of weakness in the housing market prompted investors to look past a rebound in major retailers’ sales figures.A weak forecast from Toll Brothers Inc., the nation’s largest builder of luxury homes, pressured housing stocks and rekindled concerns about whether the slumping housing market would hurt the economy. And HSBC Holdings PLC, the European bank, announced an increase in its provisions for soured mortgage loans, which hurt shares of US banks.

Investors were hoping for news or data that would send stocks higher after days of largely meandering trading, but they didn’t find it in generally decent retail sales reports. Wal-Mart Stores Inc., the world’s largest retailer, topped Wall Street’s forecast though the month’s increase was modest.

“I don’t think there is any one thing to point to as a catalyst but just the aggregation of a couple of small things,” Jack Caffrey, equity strategist for JPMorgan Private Bank, said of the day’s trading. “I think there is a growing recognition that we have come so far with a stutter or a stumble.”

“There’s certainly not a sense of panic and I think people still have an interest in buying if they can get an attractive entry point.” The Dow industrials fell 29.24, or 0.23 percent, to 12,637.63.

Broader stock indicators also fell. The Standard & Poor’s 500 index was down 1.71, or 0.12 percent, at 1,448.31, while the Nasdaq composite index fell 1.83, or 0.07 percent, to 2,488.67.

Bond prices rose as stocks retreated. The yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury note fell to 4.73 percent from 4.74 percent late on Wednesday. The dollar was mixed against other major currencies, while gold prices rose.

Energy traders rushed back into the market amid frigid temperatures in the US and after Occidental Petroleum Corp. shut a field in California following a fire. Light, sweet crude settled up $2 at $59.71 per barrel, its highest price this year on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The market seemed little moved by the Commerce Department’s report that wholesale inventories fell 0.5 percent to a seasonally adjusted $393.76 billion. Analysts expected an increase of 0.5 percent.

Similarly, investors appeared unfazed by a slight up-tick in the number of newly laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits; the report indicated the job market remains solid.

The Labour Department said 311,000 newly laid off workers sought benefits last week, an increase of 3,000 from the prior week.

In Europe, both the Bank of England and the European bank left interest rates unchanged, mirroring a decision by the US Federal Reserve last week to stand pat on rates. The European bank hinted, however, that a rate hike might be in the offing.

Worries about the housing market started with HSBC, which said it was seeing an increase in delinquencies in the US subprime lending market.

HSBC, which is traded in American Depositary Receipts on the New York Stock Exchange, fell $2.44 to $89.78.

Citigroup Inc. fell 51 cents to $54.44, while JPMorgan Chase & Co. was off 28 cents at $50.93. Adding to concerns about mortgages, New Century Financial Corp. fell $10.92, or 36.2 percent, to $19.24, a new 52-week low after the mortgage lender said it didn’t properly account for some of the home loans it had to buy back.

Toll Brothers fell $1.04, or 3 percent, to $33.39 after saying its first-quarter home building revenue would fall by 19 percent. Hovnanian Enterprises Inc., another builder, was off $1.55, or 4.3 percent, at $34.74. Walt Disney Co., which owns the ESPN and ABC television networks and its namesake theme parks, reported better-than-expected fiscal first-quarter earnings amid strong DVD sales for its “Pirates of the Caribbean” films. Disney slipped 19 cents to $35.29.

Electronic Data Systems Corp.’s fourth-quarter profit nearly doubled and contract signings, which help indicate how strong revenue will be in the future, rose sharply. The computer services company rose 84 cents, or 3.1 percent, to $27.92 after issuing a 2007 forecast that topped Wall Street’s expectations.

The market was unimpressed despite a pick-up in retail sales.

“A lot of consumers didn’t do what people had hoped for in January,” said Ryan Detrick, an analyst at Schaeffer’s Investment Research in Cincinnati. “No one really missed a lot. There wasn’t anyone that was really blowing up, but overall the market took it negatively,” he said of the retailers.

“At the same time, the market has been going up and we’re due for a sell.”

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by about 6 to 5 on the New York Stock Exchange, where consolidated volume came to 2.81 billion shares, compared with 2.62 billion on Wednesday.