Oil prices rise, but not by enough to drag Wall Street far off its records

Maj.-Gen. (Ret’d) David Fraser on what the recent exchange of airstrikes means for peace talks between the U.S. and Iran.

NEW YORK (AP) — Oil prices are rising Monday following the latest fighting to threaten the U.S.-Iran ceasefire, but Wall Street isn’t very worried, and U.S. stocks are hanging around their records.

The S&P 500 was virtually unchanged from its all-time high set on Friday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 130 points, or 0.3 per cent, as of 9:35 a.m. Eastern time, and the Nasdaq composite was flat. Both are also coming off records.

Science Applications International Corp. jumped 12.3 per cent after becoming the latest U.S. company to report bigger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. SAIC also raised its forecasts for upcoming financial results after winning several contracts from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, army and other agencies.

A cavalcade of such profit reports has helped the U.S. stock market push to records even though the war with Iran has driven up the price of oil and inflation by slowing the deliveries of crude coming from the Persian Gulf. The price for a barrel of Brent crude oil, the international standard, rose 5 per cent to US$95.69, well above its level of roughly US$70 from before the war.

That hurt stocks of companies with already big fuel bills. United Airlines lost 2.7 per cent, and Royal Caribbean Group fell 1.6 per cent.

But hope seems to be remaining on Wall Street that the United States and Iran will still reach an agreement to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and allow oil tankers to move freely again.

Strength from several market heavyweights also helped to push aside such fears.

Nvidia was the strongest force lifting the market and rose 3.8 per cent after CEO Jensen Huang announced several updates at a conference. Among them, he said the company’s next-generation artificial-intelligence platform, Vera Rubin, is ramping into full production. That helped calm some investor concerns about potential delays, analysts said.

What Nvidia does matters immensely to the U.S. stock market because it’s the biggest in terms of overall market value. That means the movements for its stock carry more weight on the S&P 500 than any other’s.

And Wall Street’s biggest companies have been growing so much that they’re dominating the market. The top 10 stocks control nearly half the S&P 500’s total market value, a 40-year high, according to Thomas Carroll, equity market strategist at Stifel.

That has worked well as those largely Big Tech companies have shot higher thanks to AI exuberance. But it could also weigh on the index if the market’s leadership broadens, Carroll warns. And a key indicator he follows about market breadth “is signaling a rotation is coming,” he wrote in a report.

Even if most stocks end up rising in such a rotation, declines for Big Tech heavyweights could nevertheless drag on S&P 500 index funds.

Elsewhere on Wall Street, Berkshire Hathaway slipped 0.5 per cent after it said it would buy Taylor Morrison Home for US$6.8 billion. It’s one of the first big acquisitions announced by the company under Greg Abel’s leadership following famed investor Warren Buffett.

Taylor Morrison Home jumped 22.4 per cent.

IBM rallied 5.9 per cent after analysts raised expectations for the tech giant’s stock price. Shares of IBM also closed up 12 per cent on Friday, giving it a nearly 30 per cent gain in May, when the New York company announced a US$1 billion government grant to help it build a quantum chip foundry.

In the bond market, Treasury yields rose with oil prices. The yield for the 10-year Treasury climbed to 4.50 per cent from 4.45 per cent late Friday.

High yields in bond markets  worldwide recently have threatened to slow economies and undercut prices for stocks and all kinds of other investments. High yields have already forced the average long-term U.S. mortgage rate to its most expensive level in nine months, and they could curtail companies’ borrowing to build the AI data centers that have supported the U.S. economy’s growth  recently.

In stock markets abroad, indexes fell in Europe following a stronger finish in Asia.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 rose 0.9 per cent, and South Korea’s Kospi jumped 3.7 per cent to hit records led by technology-related stocks, as investors continued to see growth in AI and other advanced technologies.

___

Stan Choe, The Associated Press. AP Business Writers Chan Ho-him and Matt Ott contributed.