It was another day of gains on Wall Street on Mon, while crude oil prices slumped on worries over the potential impact on demand of lockdowns in China.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average gained 94.65 pts, or 0.27%, to close at 34,955.89. The S&P 500 index rose 0.71%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite advanced 1.31%. The small cap Russell 2000 closed nearly flat.
Tesla (TSLA US, +8.03%) shares jumped after it said that it plans to seek shareholder approval that would enable another stock split. Amazon (AMZN US, +2.56%) became the first mega cap tech stock to erase losses for the year. Currently, it posted a ytd return of 1.3%.
The front-month Brent and WTI futures closed down $8.17 at US$112.48/bbl and $7.94 at US$105.96/bbl respectively.
The yield on the 10-year Treasury note slipped 1.46 basis points (bps) to 2.4585%. The 5-year Treasury yield (2.5564%) and 30-year Treasury yield (2.5399%) inverted on Mon for the first time since 2006.
Aussie 3-year yields jumped to the highest since 2014.
The Bank of Japan intervened to cap the rise in Japanese yields on Mon, but the 10-year still rose to 0.247%, the top of its allowed range under the yield curve control. The Japanese yen is trading around 123.73 per US dollar as it continued to weaken, hovering near a six-year low.
The most actively traded US gold futures (Apr) contracts settled down $14.40, or 0.7%, at US$1,939.80/oz. May silver, which is the most actively traded silver futures, fell 41.9 cents, or 1.6%, to end at US$25.196/oz. Bitcoin is trading this around US$47,500 this morning.
That’s about 6% higher than Fri. The ICE dollar index (DXY), which measures the strength of the greenback against a basket of currencies, rose 0.31% to 99.091.
The Cboe volatility index (VIX) closed below 20 for the first time since Jan 14.
European equity markets finished mixed on Mon. The UK FTSE lost 0.14%, France's CAC 40 rose 0.54%, while the German DAX advanced 0.78%.