Market check: Tech leads Nasdaq higher, retail stocks rise, gold surges

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre examines market and sector gains heading into the day's final trading hour, in addition to Nasdaq leaders, the travel industry, ARK ETF components, and commodity price actions.

Video transcript

JARED BLIKRE: That's right, we're sitting on some nice gains for the day. Dow is up 250 points. Show you a chart real quick of the day's price action.

From the lower-left just about to the upper-right, NASDAQ, as you said, Seana, really the outperformer of the day. And I just want to show you a year to date chart, because we are now in territory we haven't been since early May. And we are just climbing back up there.

But as I've been saying, S&P 500 still needs to clear, what is that 4,200? Not quite there yet.

Let's take a look at the sector action, where we see retail stocks, that would be consumer discretionary, XLY, that is up 2%, so is materials and communication services. Tech a little bit behind that. And industrials, all of those are outperforming. So interesting mix there.

Materials, we're going to talk about the dollar in a bit and how the declining dollar today is boosting that sector. Well, you can see a lot of green here. Microsoft guided lower on its, I believe, third quarter revenue. So that stock is just about unchanged right now.

But elsewhere, we are seeing a lot of green. And let's just take a look at our leaders index, because we have the Ark component, the Ark ETF, that's up over 6%. IPOs doing well, Chinese stocks, solar stocks, internet stocks, gambling stocks, chip stocks. That's a lot of stocks in the green here.

Do want to check out the travel sector. And we are seeing a lot of green here, Expedia, some of the bookers up nicely, 5% for them. Booking up 5% as well. Airbnb, a little bit less here, about 3.8%. And then let's take a look at some of those beaten-down ARK Innovation names, where we can see--

Look at that, Path is up almost 17%. And Teladoc up 10%. So nice to see some of the green here. Oh, I did mention the futures market. So let's get to commodities. The dollar is having a big reversal day from its big up day yesterday. And some of these commodities are catching a tailwind here. Copper, HG=F, that is up 5%. RBOB gasoline futures up 3%, not so good. Heating oil up 2%. Platinum, gold, cotton, so we see a lot of green today. That's my big conclusion, guys.