A currency trader passes by screens showing the Korea Composite Stock Price Index (KOSPI), left, and the foreign exchange rate between U.S. dollar and South Korean won, center, at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, March 25, 2021. Shares advanced in Asia on Thursday after a broad decline on Wall Street led by selling of tech heavyweights like Facebook and Apple.
Currency traders watch monitors at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, March 25, 2021. Shares advanced in Asia on Thursday after a broad decline on Wall Street led by selling of tech heavyweights like Facebook and Apple.
Currency traders watch monitors at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, March 25, 2021. Shares advanced in Asia on Thursday after a broad decline on Wall Street led by selling of tech heavyweights like Facebook and Apple.
Currency traders watch monitors at the foreign exchange dealing room of the KEB Hana Bank headquarters in Seoul, South Korea, Thursday, March 25, 2021. Shares advanced in Asia on Thursday after a broad decline on Wall Street led by selling of tech heavyweights like Facebook and Apple.
Pedestrians walk past the New York Stock Exchange in New York’s Financial District, Tuesday, March 23, 2021. Stocks are slipping in early trading on Wall Street Thursday, with energy stock taking the hardest hits as the price of oil falls back, despite a round of encouraging reports on the economy.
Stocks are pulling mostly higher in afternoon trading on Wall Street after shaking off some wobbles from earlier in the day. Gains for banks and industrial companies are offsetting weakness in Big Tech stocks.
Energy companies were also lower as the price of crude oil sank. Investors were also digesting a round of encouraging reports on the economy.
The S&P 500 rose 0.4% for the latest round of back-and-forth trading it’s gone through the last few weeks.
The market has been mostly tumbling in place recently, with support for stocks coming from expectations that the economy will soar soon thanks to COVID-19 vaccinations and huge amounts of spending by Washington. A quick rise in interest rates has undercut stocks at the same time, though.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 126 points, or 0.4%, at 32,554, as of 3:11 p.m. Eastern time. The Nasdaq was up 0.1%. The Russell 2000 index of smaller stocks was doing much better than the rest of the market with a 1.7% gain.
Stocks of energy producers dropped to the market’s sharpest losses after the price of U.S. oil slumped 4.3% to close at $58.56 a barrel. Diamondback Energy fell 1.6%, and Halliburton dropped 1.7%.
The slump in the price of crude oil followed a 6% jump a day earlier, when it climbed above $61 per barrel after a skyscraper-sized cargo ship wedged itself across Egypt’s Suez Canal and raised worries about supply disruptions.
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