The nonchalance of Carl Icahn in his Tuesday evening CNBC interview, as he was handed and then proceeded to sip on a martini, was of no solace to investors in Wednesday’s trading session, as stocks slipped across the board by the closing bell.

While the Dow and S&P ended only modestly lower, the NASDAQ was dragged further asunder by tech shares, as companies throughout the sector pared back gains from previous sessions.

Ahead of a much-anticipated earnings statement from Apple (AAPL) , economic data in the form of drastically lower housing sales for the month of March, an anemic preliminary reading on US manufacturing, and poor results from AT&T (T) and Amgen (AMGN) held the broader market back.

Results for April 23, 2014

?     Standard & Poor’s 500: -0.22 percent to 1,875.39

?     NASDAQ: -0.83 percent to 4,126.97

?     Dow Jones Industrial Average: -0.08 percent to 16,501.65

Our Top Stories

?     Senior Editor Joel Anderson breaks down options-investing.

?     Tim Melvin helps readers avoid being taken for a ride in the thick of earnings season.

?     Senior Editor Michael Teague provides a quasi-psychoanalytic analysis of Silicon Valley’s newest escape vehicle Tsunamiball in the context of the new tech bubble many have been warning of.

?     As a reminder of the growing importance of offshore oil and gas production, readers should have a look at this National Geographic documentary about Royal Dutch Shell’s ($RDS.A) Gulf of Mexico Perdido well.

?     A handy infographic detailing seven basic mistakes made by retirement-investors.

Stocks

?     Some of the components of Equities.com’s Small-Cap Stars index, including Plug Power (PLUG) , are handily outperforming the broader small-cap market in 2014, and this despite the recent downturn in growth-stocks.

?     Senior Editor Jacob Harper revisits breakout micro-cap tech stocks.

?     A reminder that three IPOs were rescheduled from last week to the current one: Scynexis ($SCYX), Quotient ($QTNT), and Aldeyra Therapeutics ($ALDX).