STORY: U.S. stocks ended mostly lower on Wednesday, with the Dow dropping almost 1%, the S&P 500 shedding about a third of a percent and the Nasdaq ticking up marginally.Drops in the Dow and S&P 500 followed intraday record highs earlier in the session.But Jason Browne, president of Alexis Investment Partners, said that kind of volatility is to be expected."I think the big picture here is we're off to a very strong start, but it's following a very strong couple of years. And you know, we've seen an increase in volatility. For example, last year we had a pretty big pullback early in the year. We expect that to kind of continue this year as well, year two of an election cycle, and so forth. So I think people are still trying to figure out, you know, how do they want to be positioned, what are the things that they don't own that they like to own? You're just going to see a lot of, I think, give and take in terms of leadership and maybe a little bit of a pause, you know, after the strong start. That wouldn't surprise us at all.”Among the day's stock moves, shares of housing acquisition companies tumbled after President Donald Trump said he was moving to ban Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes, in a bid to reduce home prices.Blackstone and Apollo Global Management fell more than 5%. American Homes 4 Rent fell more than 4%.Shares of Northrop Grumman slid 5.5% and Lockheed Martin lost nearly 5% after Trump said he would not permit dividends or stock buybacks for defense companies until they fix problems with the production of military equipment. In a social media post, Trump did not mention specific company names.On the tech front, shares of Nvidia, Microsoft and Alphabet rose, but memory and storage companies gave up some of their steep gains following a recent rally. Western Digital dropped almost 9% and Seagate Technology fell more than 6.5%.