Walmart's stock is on track for its worst point drop in its history as a publicly traded entity

Shares of Walmart Inc. late-Tuesday morning were getting walloped, with the retailing giant on pace to log its worst dollar decline of all time and its worst percentage drop since October of 2015, according to FactSet data. The world's largest retailer was under heavy selling pressure after it said online sales growth slowed during the fourth quarter. That marks a turn from three quarters of strong online growth, for the Bentonville, Ark.-based company as it attempts to wage war against rival and retailing behemoth Amazon.com Inc. . Walmart has been a publicly traded company since the early 1970s. On the upside, Walmart reported that sales in existing stores rose 2.6% in the fourth quarter, representing its 14th consecutive quarter of growth. Walmart's decline was weighing on the broader market, yanking the Dow Jones Industrial Average , where it is a component, down by about 70 points, while the S&P 500 index's consumer-staples sector, as measured by the Consumer Staples Select Sector SPDR ETF , was also getting whacked, with declines there weighing on the broad-market S&P 500. Nearly all the components of the XLP, referring to its ticker, were trading in negative territory. Most recently, the Dow was off 130 points, or 0.5%, the S&P 500 index was down 0.2% at 2,726, while the technology-laden Nasdaq Composite Index was up 0.3% at 7,264, bucking the overall Walmart-driven slide for U.S. equities.

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