Markets rise after opening bell as regional bank stocks rally

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre joins the Live show to discuss how markets are moving following the opening bell on Monday.

Video transcript

- Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live this morning. Let's take a look at the major averages here, as we are green across the screen to start off a fresh week, and the final trading week of March and of the quarter here. For more, let's get to Jared Blikre at the YFi Interactive. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: All right. We're going to get some monthly candlesticks at the end of the month. But for today, we're seeing a little bit of green on the board. S&P 500 up half a percent. NASDAQ up a little bit less than that. And the Dow is leading the way, up 6/10 of a percent. By the way, this is a flip-flop from what has happened typically this year-- that would be the NASDAQ leading-- and is more of a reflection of what was happening last year, a Dow-leading market.

So let's see what brings of this. But right now, financials really leading the way. That's giving the Dow a little bit more heft right now. It has more exposure to the financial and the traditional health care sector than the NASDAQ if you scratch out biotech. Staples also in the forefront here. Utilities, consumer discretionary, industrials all rounding out the top row. Tech and communication services, those that you would see in the NASDAQ 100 and some of those mega caps, those are down, but just only slightly right now.

And I do want to focus on some of our leaders here. And KRE. Brad was just taking a look at the banking sector and the regional banks with the latest divestitures-- or sale, I should say, of those SVB assets. Finally, KRE up 2 and 1/2%. ARKK, the disruption ETF, that's up 1%. To the downside. Chinese stocks are down 2%. Had some interesting news overnight with respect to China. First, industrial profits for January and February, that sank by about-- whoa, what was it? I forget the exact number, but by a considerable amount versus last year. That was not a huge surprise. But also, Jack Ma surfaced in China.

Now, Jack Ma has a very storied I guess story with respect to the Chinese authorities going back to 2020. That was when Ant Financial, a subsidiary or affiliate of Alibaba, was supposed to go public. Jack Ma disappeared. There were a lot of rumors surrounding his disappearance there. And then the next year, Didi went public. Unrelated company to Baba. But that was a terrible IPO for US investors. So all in all, it's been a really interesting development there with respect to China. You can see most of these shares in the red right now. There was a brief pop when that Alibaba-Jack Ma news surfaced.

But I have to move on to crypto real quickly. We're seeing Bitcoin easing off that 28,000. Level we've seen some positive developments with respect to price action here. On a three-year chart, you can see still on the very low end of this range. But importantly, we do have a series of higher highs, higher lows, and we are in a short and medium term uptrend here, guys.