Shares on Wall Street erased gains and fell into the red on Wed, after a case of
the omicron variant was confirmed in California
The S&P 500 Index closed down 1.18%, suffering its worst two-day selloff since
Oct 2020. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 461.68 pts, or 1.34%, to close
at 34,022.04. The Nasdaq Composite dropped 1.83% to 15,254.05 after rising
as much as 1.8% earlier in the session. The small-cap Russell 2000 lost 2.34%.
The CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) jumped from 27.19 to 31.1. The VIX is now at
its highest level since Jan.
The yield on the 30-year US Treasury bond fell to its lowest level since Jan. The
30-year yield dropped 2.7 bps to 1.753%. The yield on the 10-year Treasury
note slipped 4.06 basis points (bps) to 1.4037%.
Treasury yields dropped despite a strong ADP jobs report and Fed Chair Jerome
Powell telling the House Financial Services Committee that the Fed should
consider winding down its asset purchase program sooner than planned.
Fintech giant Square (SQ US, -6.7%) is changing its name to Block, effective
December 10, as it focuses on new technologies such as the block chain.
In after-hours trade, cloud computing data manager Snowflake (SNOW US, -
8.57%) has jumped 14.17%, after reporting better-than-projected revenue and a
bullish forecast, fuelled by a gain in new customers.
The most actively traded US gold futures (Feb) contract settled up $7.80, or
0.4%, at US$1,784.30/oz.
March silver, which is the most actively traded silver futures, fell 47.6 cents, or
2.1%, to end at US$22.339/oz.
The ICE dollar index (DXY), which measures the strength of the greenback
against a basket of currencies, rose 0.04% to 96.028.
The front-month Brent and WTI futures closed down $1.70 at US$68.87/bbl and
61 cents at US$65.57/bbl respectively.
European equity markets finished higher on Wed. The UK FTSE gained 1.55%,
France's CAC 40 rose 2.39%, while the German DAX advanced 2.47%.