Equities, meanwhile, have slipped across the world but hadn’t posted a meaningful pullback since the two nations started taking verbal jabs at each other.
The S&P was only down 0.1 percent for the week entering the session. In Europe, the Stoxx 600 index has fallen 1.2 percent for the week.
“Our assumption is that the ‘battle of the bombasts’ will remain verbal for the foreseeable future and that Guam will drop out of the headlines as quickly as it has been inserted into them,” Michael Shaoul, chairman and CEO of Marketfield Asset Management, said in a note.
“It remains possible that we will see another brief lurch downwards, particularly in the technology sector that seems to be the locus of hedging activity, but the chances of this developing into a meaningful correction still looks remote at the current time,” Shaoul said.
Investors also kept an eye on tech stocks, as the year’s best-performing sector dropped more than 1 percent.
The sector “seems a little crowded,” Darrell Cronk, president at Wells Fargo Investment Institute, told CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street.” “When you look at active managers’ positioning today, they are 30 percent over-positioned to a historical norm.”
Wall Street also turned its eyes to retail earnings, as Macy’s and Kohl’s both reported better-than-expected quarterly results. Dillard’s, however, posted much weaker-than-expected results, sending the stock down 16 percent.
Calendar second-quarter earnings have been mostly better than expected, with growth surpassing initial expectations and most S&P 500 companies topping profit and sales estimates.
The positive earnings helped lift U.S. stocks to record highs. Last week, the Dow broke above 22,000 for the first time.
—CNBC’s Alexandra Gibbs contributed to this report.
