US stocks (^DJI, ^IXIC, ^GSPC) ended the first day of March trading in a mixed bag on Monday — the Nasdaq Composite managed to close 0.36% higher — as Wall Street contends with further geopolitical uncertainty stemming from US airstrikes against Iran.
Yahoo Finance Markets and Data Editor Jared Blikre breaks down the biggest market themes from today’s trading day, including how market indexes regained some of their losses in the session, the consensus around the broad geopolitical pressures, and the price action sending oil prices (CL=F, BZ=F) higher.
To watch more expert insights and analysis on the latest market action, check out more Asking for a Trend.
00:00 Speaker A
Thank you Josh, we got to talk about what happened this morning. Stocks were deep in the red and then they fought back all day and uh S&P 500 actually eked out a small win. There it is. Four basis points or 2.74 points. Two numbers I want you to focus on, the low of the day which was just about under 6,800 and then the all-time high which is 7,000. And I’ve been showing this chart a lot recently. Well, this is the intraday, that was pretty choppy.
00:26 Speaker A
Let me show the six month because from uh basically the beginning of this year, we have seen a lot of sideways chopping action, 6,800 to 7,000. In fact, the low of today, if you were to look at an intraday basis, we tagged that number. So, very much alive here. Eventually we’re going to break this range and I think it’ll be to the upside, but it could also be to the downside. So we got to look for clues about that. But let me just show you what happened today off some of those big headlines coming out.
01:01 Speaker A
Energy, a natural winner. Crude oil, if we have time, we’re going to get to that. Huge, huge day there. So, energy looking green today, but also defense stocks. This is one of the best performing industries, uh going back to those April lows of last year. Northrup Grumman, Grumman, uh Lockheed Martin, RTX, and the list goes on. But also, broadly speaking, industrials, and some of those names are repeated here, but like Caterpillar, New, um and then agricultural stocks as well. And we’ve we went into deep uh deep dive on these last week, but nevertheless, industrials looking pretty strong and this is just a subset of that.
01:43 Speaker B
So those are the winners. What wasn’t working today?
01:45 Speaker A
Yeah, well, there are a few different groups there. So let’s talk about what was under pressure. First of all, travel stocks were not looking that good and let’s see if I can find those real quick. And there we go. Here’s my travel heat map. We were talking with some uh some analysts about cruise lines. Carnival got smacked for 7% to the downside, uh Norwegian down 10%. Airlines not doing that great either. Uh Southwest down 2%, American Air down 4%. Uh but it wasn’t just limited to them, it was retail broadly. And we know that retail has had kind of a tough time over the last few weeks.
02:22 Speaker A
A week ago, we were talking about a winter storm keeping people indoors. Well, here’s what it looked like today. Then you break it down into some of the industries. Here’s apparel, a lot of dark red right there. and then luxury, uh some more dark red. So a lot of these retail names that have not done well this year, they did even worse today.
02:39 Speaker B
What about the source, the concern, my friend? Oil.
02:42 Speaker A
Yeah, let’s check out WTI crude oil because that had an an important technical development today. So I’m going to go back to our main list of stocks here. Just take me a second. Crude oil is basically in a downward uh sloping trend range for a number of years and it’s just breaking out right now. So this is a pretty big technical development. I’m going to go to a five-year chart and here’s the Russian invasion of Ukraine all the way up there.
03:11 Speaker A
That was in 2022. Uh and then we’ve seen this downward slide, but check this out. We punched above it today, closed up about 6, 7 uh percent. We were up maybe 10, 12% at the highs. So this could signal a regime change and with higher energy prices, that just feeds into everything else.
03:26 Speaker B
All right, thank you, buddy. Appreciate it.
03:27 Speaker A
Thank you.
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