By Stan Choe
Stocks rallied worldwide on Tuesday as more countries relaxed restrictions on businesses, raising hopes for a recovery from the historic plunge sweeping the global economy.
The S&P 500 rose 1.4% in morning trading following similar gains in Paris, London, and Hong Kong. Crude oil also continued its mini-rally after falling to record lows last month.
In California, some retail businesses could begin serving customers again as early as Friday, under some restrictions. Many European countries have also begun relaxing strict orders meant to slow the spread of the coronavirus outbreak while waiting to see if it leads to a rise in infections. In Asia, the first pitches of the South Korean baseball season thwacked into catchers’ mitts, albeit in stadiums with no fans in attendance.
“It is hard to be a raging pessimist when lockdowns are lifting in the next few weeks,” Stephen Innes of AxiCorp said in a commentary.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average was up 200 points, or 1.3%, at 24,050, as of 10:30 a.m. Eastern time. The Nasdaq was up 1.6%.
The stock market has been rallying since late March, as investors look beyond the devastation that’s currently ravaging the global economy. They’re focusing instead on the prospects for a resumption of growth later in the year, as well as on the massive support for markets provided by the Federal Reserve. Many analysts are skeptical of the stock market’s rally, saying it’s overdone given all the uncertainty about how long the recession will last, but the S&P 500 has nevertheless more than halved its losses from its sell-off earlier in the year.
A report released Tuesday morning showed that the U.S. services industry shrank for the first time in a decade, but it caused barely a ripple in the stock or bond market. It wasn’t quite as terrible as economists had forecast.
Hopes that the reopening of economies will eventually lead to a pickup in demand have also very recently helped oil prices pull off the floor. A barrel of U.S. oil to be delivered in June rose 17.5% to $23.96 Tuesday, up from a low point of $6.50 set late last month. It’s still well below the roughly $60 that it cost at the start of the year, after plunging on worries that the collapse in oil demand would lead to topped-out storage tanks.
Brent crude, the standard for international pricing, gained 11% to $30.20 per barrel.
“The feeling on the floor is that energy is in a better spot, and while it’s not brilliant,“ the gulf between oil supplies and demand “is starting to shift in a more positive direction,” Chris Weston of Pepperstone said in a report.
That helped energy stocks in the S&P 500 climb 2.1% for the biggest gain among the 11 sectors that make up the index.
Technology stocks also continued their strong run, and Apple and Microsoft both rose at least 1.4%. That’s big for the S&P 500 because those two companies alone account for 11% of the entire index’s market value. Tech stocks in the S&P 500 have erased all their losses for 2020 so far, after earlier being down as much as 23%.
The market’s gains were widespread, though. And small stocks in the Russell 2000 index were doing even better than their larger rivals, a sign of rising expectations for coming economic growth. The Russell 2000 was up 2.2%.
In Europe, Germany’s DAX rose 2.2%, the CAC 40 in Paris gained 2.4% and the FTSE 100 in London rose 1.9%.
Hong Kong’s Hang Seng added 1.1% as the government said it would relax some social distancing measures, allowing certain businesses such as gyms, cinemas, and beauty salons to reopen and doubling the number of individuals allowed at public gatherings to a maximum of eight. Markets in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Seoul were closed for holidays.
In another sign of a bit less pessimism in the market, the yield on the 10-year Treasury note rose to 0.66% from 0.63% late Monday. Treasury yields tend to rise when investors are upgrading their expectations for the economy and inflation. But it’s still well below the 1.90% it yielded at the start of the year.
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AP Business Writer Elaine Kurtenbach contributed.
