Stocks fell Monday as investors took a pause from a historic rally in September and held back ahead of a busy week of economic and earnings reports.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell about 100 points in midday trading after a report showed factory orders fell slightly more than expected in August, but pending home sales rose a bit more than forecast.

Analysts say the market was due for a pullback following a 10.4 percent gain in the Dow last month. The monthlong rally has come on relatively low volume, a sign that many investors are still waiting on the sidelines.

Doug Roberts, chief investment strategist at Channel Capital Research, said the market has been trading in a broad range over the past six months. And with it approaching the high end of that range, a pullback is natural.

The market has been "alternating between euphoria and despair," Roberts said of the wide trading range dating back to late April, when stocks hit their high for the year.

This week brings a number of potentially important news events for stocks, including the monthly jobs survey on Friday and earnings from Dow component Alcoa Inc. on Thursday, the traditional kickoff to the quarterly earnings season.

PC and semiconductor stocks face trouble as sales growth slows. Warnings from Intel, National Semi, PMC-Sierra worry investors.

Earnings warnings from the chip industry have started to pile up. In late August, Intel cut its third-quarter sales guidance, cautioning that "revenue is being affected by weaker-than-expected demand for consumer PCs in mature markets." Not long after, there was a similar pre-announcement from National Semiconductor, which in early September said that "in the near term, slower growth in our end markets and distribution channel, along with some likely inventory reduction, will mute the seasonal growth that we would normally see in our business during this time of the year."

There were warnings earlier this month, as well, from Monolithic Power Systems and Silicon Laboratories. Last week, PMC-Sierra, known mostly for selling chips to the communications sector, cut third-quarter guidance with little explanation. Thursday afternoon, Advanced Micro Devices warned third-quarter revenue would be 1% to 4% below that of the second quarter, "due to weaker than expected demand, particularly in the consumer notebook market in Western Europe and North America."

So, is the worst over? I doubt it. CreditSights analysts Ping Zhao and Jordan Chalfin noted in a commentary last week that inventory in a number of sectors—including semiconductors, storage, PCs and distribution—has been ratcheting steadily higher. The analysts report that most tech sectors saw second-quarter inventory days rise from first-quarter levels—the opposite of the pattern a year earlier. The CreditSights analysts are particularly concerned about rising inventory at electronics distributors, warning that "any distribution inventory correction could have a negative impact to semiconductor companies' margins."

An energy trading firm has agreed to pay a $6 million fine to settle federal regulators' charges of misleading an exchange by failing to disclose facts concerning its relationship with a subsidiary.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which announced the settlement Tuesday, said the withholding of information by Houston-based Vitol Inc. and Vitol Capital Management Ltd. caused the New York Mercantile Exchange to fail to add their market positions together. Combining their positions would have put the firms over the exchange's limits on the amount of future contracts that can be held by a firm at a given time, the CFTC said.

The two firms neither admitted nor denied the charges. Vitol Inc. is the U.S. subsidiary of Vitol SA, a privately held company based in Geneva, Switzerland, that is one of the world's biggest energy traders.

Vitol trades energy commodities and engages in trading in energy futures and options on the NYMEX as a hedging strategy. Vitol Capital Management trades in energy derivatives as well as futures and options, according to the CFTC.

The two firms did their trading separately but shared market information and should have reported their market positions together, the agency said. The firms learned in June 2007 that the NYMEX had an inaccurate perception of their relationship, the CFTC alleged. Rather than correct the perception, it said, the firms put in only "limited barriers" to prevent the flow of trading information between them. They "willfully failed to disclose to the NYMEX the true nature of the firms' relationship," the CFTC said in a news release.

Global financial regulators on Sunday agreed on new rules designed to strengthen bank finances and rein in excessive risk-taking to help prevent another crisis.

Banks will be forced to hold more and safer kinds of capital to offset the risks they take lending money and trading securities, which should make them more resistant to financial shocks such as those of the last several years.

European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet, chairman of the committee of central bankers and bank supervisors that worked on the new rules, called the agreement "a fundamental strengthening of global capital standards."

"Their contribution to long-term financial stability and growth will be substantial," Trichet said in a statement.

U.S. officials including Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke in a joint statement called the new standards a "significant step forward in reducing the incidence and severity of future financial crises

Some banks have protested however that the new rules may hurt their profitability and cause them to reduce the lending that fuels economic growth, possibly dampening a global economic recovery.

Representatives of major central banks, including the ECB and the U.S. Federal Reserve, agreed to the deal at a meeting in Basel, Switzerland, on Sunday. The deal still has to be presented to leaders of the Group of 20 forum of rich and developing countries at a meeting in November and ratified by national governments before it comes into force.