NEW YORK — It was a bad day to be an investor in Citigroup or tech stocks.

U.S. stock indexes edged lower for a second day Thursday as investors continued to retreat from technology stocks. The technology-heavy Nasdaq composite index closed at its lowest level in six weeks.

Citigroup fell 5 percent after the Federal Reserve denied the bank’s plan to raise its dividend and buy back more stock. Most other major banks won approval to raise their dividends.

The Standard & Poor’s 500 index lost 3.52 points, or 0.2 percent, to 1,849.04 and the Nasdaq dropped 22.35 points, or 0.5 percent, to 4,151.23.

The Dow Jones industrial average fell a modest 4.76 points, or less than 0.1 percent, to end at 16,264.23. The blue-chip index benefited from a gain in Exxon Mobil, which rose $1.54, or 1.6 percent, to $96.24 as the price of oil increased 1 percent to just over $101 a barrel.

Once again, the high-flying technology stocks that soared in 2013 were among the hardest hit. Tesla Motors fell nearly 3 percent, Netflix lost 2.2 percent and Google fell 1.6 percent.

The sell-off continues what has already been a tough month for technology stocks. Netflix is down 18 percent this month, and Twitter and Tesla have fallen 16 and 15 percent, respectively.

Investors say it’s reassuring to see some of the air come out of these speculative technology stocks. Netflix is still is trading at 90 times its expected 2014 earnings; the average for companies in the S&P 500 index is 17. Tesla is worth 119 times its expected earnings and Twitter, which hasn’t even made a profit, is trading at more than 3,000 times what analysts expect the company to earn this year.

Most investors believe that while Netflix, Tesla and Facebook have bright futures, the stocks may have gotten ahead of themselves in recent months.

Citigroup was the second-biggest decliner in the S&P 500 after the Federal Reserve denied the bank’s plan to raise its dividend and buy back more stock. The bank was one of only five to have plans rejected by the Fed. Citi was the only large U.S.-based commercial bank to face a rebuke from the Fed.

Investors had been bidding up the big banks’ stock prices in the weeks heading into the announcement, in anticipation that the Fed would allow the banks, five years after the financial crisis, to return more money to investors. The nation’s biggest banks have proposed $22.79 billion in dividends this year, a 23 percent increase from a year ago, Thomson Reuters said.