Market check: Stocks rise after Omicron sell-off, crude oil falls

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre reports live from the New York Stock Exchange to provide an update on market and sector performances following the Omicron sell-off.

Video transcript

- Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live. We're about 12 minutes into the trading day on this Thursday, December 2nd. Let's head to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, where my normally fellow turtleneck wearer and colleague, Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre is on the floor. You're not wearing your turtleneck today, but tell us what's going on in the markets with crude oil, especially, moving on that OPEC news.

JARED BLIKRE: You bet. So OPEC plus is going to increase production, as they intended. 400,000 barrels in the month of January, 400,000 barrels per day. And just looking at the YFi Interactive, we got a low of $62.43. And let me just show you the intraday price action. There had been hopes building up that they would actually reduce the amount, that they were going to increase production or scrap it all together. So that would have been more bullish.

But you can see this capitulation low here. I'm calling it capitulation. And by the way, it reminds me of yesterday in the stock market towards the close. And we'll get to that in a second, but sticking with oil here. I'm going to bring up a 3 month chart. Oil is down about 22, to 23% over the last month. And pretty much at a very critical level.

So here's a year to date chart. This level right here, let's call it $62.63. That has been tested back in August, also in May. So that level very much in play. Given the oversold nature of crude right now, I would not be surprised to see some kind of a significant bounce, maybe even coming back to $70, $75. But that's kind of where the rubber meets the road, so we'll have to see what comes of that.

I want to get back to yesterday. It was a really nasty close. So let's put on a two day chart of the S&P 500. And you can see into the close, we were losing steam. And then as I read, hedge funds just began degrossing. And when you have days like this, and we had an incredible selling pressure, selling pressure that we haven't seen since May. And let me bring up a year to date chart of the S&P 500 so we can see exactly what happened.

Here is May. We had this high here. Over the course of one two, three, or four days, we had this capitulation low. We bounce back up, and then we test it again, then it was back off to the races. It doesn't mean that history has to repeat, but at a minimum, I would expect some kind of bounce back from this these levels. Do we go lower? Certainly possible. But today, probably not. And if we do, that would be very telling that the selling pressure, and the fact that people are not positioned properly, is much greater than we expected.

This is our sector heatmap. We can see what has not been working recently is working today, and vise versa. So financials, discretionary, industrials, real estate, communication services, all of these at the top are the leaders, all up more than 1%. And then you take a look at what's going on in the software sector.

This is a group that has been under a lot of pressure. And now, some of those earnings we've been talking about, Snowflake, Crowdstrike, after the bell yesterday, really helping sentiment here. But I want to show what's happened over the last month. This is nasty. Look at this. Teladoc, down 33%. VRM down over 30%. Zoom right there with it. Splunk down 26%. So not the best-- excuse me, not the best month for a software. However, being oversold, not surprised to see that it's getting a bounce today.

And then you take the semiconductors. This is over the last month, too. They've been flying high. We all know everybody needs chips, that's not going away. And we can see Qualcomm up 30%, Nvidia up 20% over the last month. And then on an intraday basis, giving it a little bit back today. So kind of a reversal of what we've seen over the last few days, guys.

- Yahoo Finance Chair, Jared Blikre, so much for breaking that down for us.