Stocks sour, US dollar, gold vs. bitcoin: Market Takeaways

Stocks taking a dive amid heightened geopolitical tensions, while oil prices surge to their highest levels since January. For more on the trading day takeaways, let's get to Yahoo Finances Jared Blickry. Jared, we had sort of a a bifurcated week, if you will. Yes.

Yes. I mean, everything looked it was pretty good yesterday. Uh, but we took a dive this morning, not surprisingly. Let me just chart this for you. It's not the end of the world. We're still pretty close to all-time highs and the major indices. VIX maybe above 20. This is a sector action. Might as well start right here. So energy in the green today, interestingly, as you pointed out this morning to me, Julie, energy was leading all week long and crude oil was kind of getting bid up and maybe there were some rumblings about this kind of action, about what we were going to see overnight beforehand. Nevertheless, energy, the big winner this week. And then we've got some other defensive sectors also coming into the top fold, health care, utilities, real estate, which is break even. Even tech, uh, tech is definitely not defensive, but what took it on the chin here is financials. We saw, especially, uh, regional banks. They those took a hit today. Industrials took a hit. That is has been the best performing sector of the year. And let's just get a quick tally on that year to date. Industrials still taking the top spot there. But let me just chart the week action in the, uh, various indices. We'll start with the Nasdaq. That's up, uh, for five days, it was down two-thirds of a percent. You can see it kind of dipped into the red as of the close yesterday. So we had that nasty sell off into the close, the peak of the week on Tuesday that when, uh, we got ever so close to those record highs. S&P 500, also closing in the red Dow, as well. And the Russell 2000 was kind of close there, uh, but it did finally close in the red over these five days. I did mention the VIX, so let's take a quick look at that. We got a pop and it is above 20. Not the end of the world because I will show you the year to date. And then you will see we got that massive spike intraday, but it hit 60 even. Uh, but we're just kind of ever so slightly off of those lows. And another thing, yesterday, Thursday, uh, we did see a pop in the VIX despite stocks being up. And so that was kind of a clue that, you know, sometimes that's a yellow flag, not a red flag.

Yeah, definitely. Okay, we had a a guest earlier today say to us that people don't just want to be in dollar denominated assets right now. They want to be a little bit more diversified. Right. So what's going on with the dollar?

diversified less. Yeah, you know, my initial thought when I saw the dollar, the Dixie this morning, and this is just an index, um, and it's a very old trade weighted index, hasn't been adjusted in 40 years. So it's very heavily, uh, weighted against with the euro. But here's the year to date in the dollar index, and it's up a whopping 3/10 of a percent. What you're going to notice is you can't even see that little pop today. It is still at three year lows. And what was interesting was that yields were also up. And you were talking about this around the close. That means if yields are up, bonds were down. So if there's a haven flow into the dollar, what were they buying? They weren't buying stocks cuz stocks were down. They weren't buying bonds cuz bonds were down. Were they coming into buy the US dollar denominated futures in gold or oil? Or oil?

Oil?

I or oil? Yeah, that could be another one. Because in order to buy WTI crude oil, you need to have dollars. So maybe that's the play right there. And, uh, let's just take a quick look at crude oil futures cuz those got a huge jump. I mean, this is the year to date. I didn't even realize this. Uh, crude oil now break even just slightly positive on the year. And let's take a look at the two-day price action. This was for this was something like 14% at the highs. And when I've seen these spikes before, Julie, and you remember the Russian invasion of Ukraine, those huge spikes tend to be one-offs. And a lot of times they just kind of drift down from there. $73 oil is not a problem, especially if we come off of that. If it got up to 100 or much less 130, that's something to write home about. But we're not even close to that right now.

Well, as we mentioned, the one group that's happy about that are the energy producers. And that's why we saw them gain.

Yeah. And real quick, let's just check that out because we have all the time in the world I've been told. Oh, but that we don't have it.

All right. Well, we could talk about something else then. Which is, I know you're also watching, and there's the energy producers today. You're watching gold versus Bitcoin.

Yes, there we go.

Yeah, so one thing that investors were buying today was gold. And I have this, don't write letters, gold greater than Bitcoin. And that's just a pure reaction function because Bitcoin did not catch a bid off of that news. In fact, gold and Bitcoin were going in opposite directions. Gold up here and Bitcoin down there. So let me get to my futures screen here, and we will see gold in the green and GC equals F. Thank you so much. Up 1.5% today. So short of the record highs here, and let's look at the year to date. It has just been chopping around. This is definitely not bearish action. And it looks right here like it's a record high, but intraday it is not. So gold futures kind of, I would be surprised if gold futures didn't reach another record. Question is, how much do they go beyond that? And then just to quickly wrap up this little thing in a bow, here's Bitcoin, down 2/3 of a percent. It's not much. So it dipped below 105,000. This is another year to date chart, and it's been kind of chopping around in here. Um, but the reaction overnight was just the opposite direction of gold. So what this tells me is Bitcoin is not quite the digital gold is not quite equal to the physical gold.

It's not a safety trade, so to speak.

Might be an inflation trade. Might be a risk-on trade, but yeah. Not that. All right, Jared, have a great weekend.

Maybe.

All right.

As you too.