Oil prices fell and US markets were mixed in early trading Thursday, a day after declines on Wall Street snapped a nine-day winning streak for the S&P 500.
Futures for the S&P 500 shed 0.4% before the opening bell, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average added 0.7%. Nasdaq futures skidded 1.2%.
Broadcom tumbled more than 15% overnight, even after posting sales and profit figures that beat Wall Street’s forecasts. Investors, who have watched the stock rise 38% this year and more than triple in the past two years, may have been disappointed that the chip and software company did not raise its full-year guidance despite soaring revenue.
PVH Corp., formerly known as Phillips-Van Heusen, slid 23% after it beat Wall Street’s first-quarter sales and profit targets, but softened its full-year outlook. PVH it expects the negative impacts from tariffs and the war in Iran to remain a drag on business.
Thursday’s decline in oil prices came after Israel and Lebanon said they had agreed to renew their fragile ceasefire and create a number of “pilot” security zones inside Lebanon from which Hezbollah militants would be banned.
Also, lawmakers in the U.S. House for the first time Wednesday approved a war powers resolution that would halt the US military action against Iran, defying President Donald Trump as a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to try to end the three-month-long conflict that has reordered politics at home and abroad and roiled world markets.
Crude had surged Wednesday when both the United States and Iran said they launched retaliations for earlier attacks o attempted ones.
Brent crude traded $2.42 lower Thursday at $95.39 per barrel, while benchmark US crude oil shed $2.30 to $93.72 per barrel.
Oil prices remain below their peaks from earlier in the war with Iran, and hope seems to be remaining on Wall Street that the United States and Iran will ultimately agree to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to oil tankers. That would improve the global flow of crude and hopefully lower its price.
Bond yields, which had pressured stocks a day earlier, steadied Thursday. The yield on the 10-year Treasury was steady inched back to 4.47%, down from 4.49% on Wednesday and 3.97% before the war began.
High yields worldwide are threatening to slow economies and undercut prices for stocks and all kinds of other investments. They 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 artificial-intelligence data centers that have supported the US economy’s growth recently.
More expensive loans can hurt smaller companies in particular because many need to borrow to grow.
Still, stocks remain near their records, even with all the pressure on the global economy created by higher inflation.
At midday in Europe, Germany’s DAX gained 0.6%. the CAC 40 in Paris jumped 1%. Britain’s FTSE 100 was off 0.5%.
Japan’s Nikkei 225 shed 1.4% to 67,470.69 on selling of technology stocks. Energy and technology giant SoftBank Group slumped 11.2%, while Shin-Etsu Chemical dropped 3.8%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng lost 1.4% to 25,274.98, and the Shanghai Composite index fell 0.8% to 4,057.78.
In South Korea, the Kospi sank 1.8% to 8,639.41, while Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 declined 1.1% to 8,686.10.
