Market check: Dow leads indices, energy stocks gain, wheat futures fall

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre breaks down how markets opened on Friday.

Video transcript

BRAD SMITH: --1, nine minutes into today's trading session on this Fri-yay. Let's get on over to Jared [INAUDIBLE] who's on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Well, we've got a mixed day here. And the NASDAQ is in the red here and it has been the leader over the last about seven, eight days. Just taking a look at the five-day returns, there's still about 5.2% here. And the Dow has been taking a back seat but is the leader today. So can see it's up 145 points, just shy of 3% over the trailing week.

Now, let's take a look inside the market. In terms of the sector action today we are seeing-- hold on for it, that's not there. Let's take a look here, and we got energy in the lead. Crude oil bouncing back a little bit. We're going to talk about commodities in a second here. Consumer discretionary, that's XLY, that's up 1% as well. And then you have utilities and materials.

So not a whole lot of action here. Communication Services, which houses all of those-- well, it houses Snap, among the other Twitter and I guess we got some other guys in there, too. Let's take a look at the social scene here because I didn't really want to talk about Snap but it seems to be the story of the day. Unfortunately, the WiFi interactive is not cooperating with me.

So we're going to take a look at some other sectors here. Here's my leader's index. We got BETZ, that's a gambling ETF. That's up almost 2%. Homebuilders, the liquidity, the bond ETF, that's down as well. We're seeing KWEB, some Chinese stock action here, that's down. ARKK Invest components, those are down. And if we take a look, some of these guys have been showing some signs of strength lately but not today.

Finally, I want to take a look at the S&P 500. We're seeing some strength here over the last seven, eight days. Finally, did get a breakout here. And I don't know if it's off to the races.

I did do a webinar with Liz Young yesterday and she's cautiously optimistic that we could have a bottom in the near-term future. But of course, this really depends on what's happening with commodities and especially the dollar.

JULIE HYMAN: Yeah, let's talk about commodities. And besides social scene, I think we can call it broken social scene, which the five Gen-Xers familiar with that band from the early 2000s will appreciate.

But I want to ask you about that commodity story that you referenced here, which has to do with a potential deal between Russia, Ukraine, and the United Nations to resume exports of food and grains through the Black Sea. And I wondered on this potential deal if we're seeing any kind of ripple effect in the market.

JARED BLIKRE: We saw a little bit. I think it was somewhat expected and telegraphed, because at my last check of the markets, wheat was down about 3%. Not the dramatic move you might have expected if this were unexpected.

I got to start with the US dollar index. This is a year to date chart. We've been tracking this. As the dollar has been screaming higher along with the short end of the curve, we have seen commodities take a back seat. So the dollar is really not doing much today. And that's kind of a benefit for a lot of the risk markets.

Let's take a look at the futures index here. Here we go. And we can see wheat is down about 4%. So we've seen this big move down in commodities over the last few months. Here's a two-month chart of wheat. You can see us down 35%. So a lot of this movement probably already baked into the cake here.

If we take a longer term view of wheat, we can see that huge run up. But we're basically back to what I would consider almost normal levels. So good news on that front. And incrementally helping, I guess, prices down the line.

BRIAN SOZZI: Jared Blikre, see you in the office soon. Thanks so much.