Oil Spikes Past $100 After Trump's Hormuz Blockade, But Stocks Stage a Midday Comeback
MarketDash
U.S. stocks clawed back from an early plunge Monday as a report of potential Iranian nuclear concessions eased fears, even after President Trump's naval blockade sent crude prices soaring above $100 a barrel. Tech led the rebound, with Oracle and ServiceNow surging, while Goldman Sachs tumbled on a revenue miss.
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So here's how your Monday went: you woke up to news that President Donald Trump had ordered a naval blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, the world's most important oil chokepoint. Crude prices immediately shot past $100 a barrel. Stocks opened sharply lower. Then, by lunchtime, a weird thing happened—markets staged a tentative comeback. It turns out that when you mix geopolitical brinkmanship with a dash of speculative hope, you get a pretty volatile cocktail.
The trigger was the weekend's failed peace talks. A U.S. delegation led by Vice President JD Vance left Pakistan on Sunday without a deal after Iran refused to abandon its nuclear ambitions. In response, Trump announced that the U.S. Navy would begin blockading all ships entering or exiting Iranian ports, effective Monday at 10:00 AM ET. That's the kind of move that tends to get the market's attention.
West Texas Intermediate crude surged to $103.16 per barrel, up 6.8% on the day. Brent crude topped $101.96, up 7.1%. For a moment, it looked like equities were in for a rough ride. But then a midday report from the New York Post suggested Iranian officials were internally studying whether to accept a U.S. condition to abandon uranium enrichment. It was just a rumor, but it was enough to offer equity markets a partial lifeline, pulling indices off their intraday lows.
By midday, the picture was split. The S&P 500 edged up 11 points, or 0.2%, to 6,827, recovering from an opening dip that had briefly pushed the index down more than 0.5%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average wasn't so lucky, falling 201 points, or 0.4%, to 47,715. It was weighed down heavily by a steep drop in Goldman Sachs Group, Inc. (GS), which slid 3.9% after first-quarter fixed-income, currencies and commodities trading revenues missed Wall Street estimates. The Nasdaq 100, meanwhile, added 84 points, or 0.3%, to 25,201, buoyed by software and cloud computing names.
Tech Software Surges, Staples And Utilities Sink As Oil Tops $100
The Technology Select Sector SPDR Fund (XLK) was the session's top-performing S&P 500 sector, rising 0.9%, powered by cloud and enterprise software stocks, which sharply rebounded after last week's selloff.
Shares of Oracle Corp. (ORCL) rallied over 8% after the enterprise software giant unveiled AI-powered upgrades to its Utilities Industry Suite and Aconex project management platform—enhancements designed to help utilities cut operating costs and improve grid reliability—and announced a new public cloud region in Casablanca, Morocco, extending its global infrastructure footprint.
