Wall Street Pushes Indexes into Green
Increasing oil prices helped Wall Street push the major indexes into the green, bouncing higher on the oil surge.
Crude prices increased 20% after President Donald Trump’s tweet on Saudi Arabia and Russia. He expected to cut crude oil production by about 10 million barrels a day.
The Dow was up 0.9%, pushed by energy components Chevron and Exxon, both rising more than 7%.
The S&P 500 was up 1.2% and the Nasdaq composite rose 0.9% while the SPDR S&P Oil & Gas Exploration & Production ETF was up 5.8%.
Stock trading on Wall Street was more bearish upon opening as more reports on the economic disruption of the coronavirus came in.
Luckin Coffee dropped 71% after it had suspended its chief operating officer. The Chinese coffee house chain withdrew its last two quarterly reports while it investigates suspicions of “misconduct”.
Muddy Waters Research referred to the stock as a fraud at the start of 2020. The short-seller has evaluated anonymous research that suggested the company’s sales were inflated.
Six percent of the U.S. workforce hit the jobless rolls with another 6.65 million people filing for unemployment. The number was more than twice as many as the 3.3 million who claimed a week earlier.
Souring Crude Oil Prices Helped Wall Street
On Wall Street, Starbucks was up 2.8% on the prospect of a major competitor in China leaving the market.
Moreover, Zoom Video lost another 5.2% in the stock market on growing concerns about the data privacy policy, and about valuation. This followed after an uncontrolled surge in demand on the back of the Covid-19-driven boom in working from home. Zoom reported that average daily users had soared to 200 million from about 10 million before the virus crisis.
Trump tweeted that he spoke with Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who spoke with President Putin of Russia. He said he expects that they will be cutting back approximately 10 Million Barrels. He further hopes they will cut substantially more which can be great for the oil & gas industry.
Another tweet from Trump came in twenty-three minutes later saying that the cuts could be up to 15 million barrels. Cuts of that size would require coordination with OPEC+, which includes Russia, however, full cooperation is still unclear.
Meanwhile, reports said Saudi Arabia had called for an urgent meeting of the OPEC+ group of producers.
