S&P 500 on track for best day in two weeks, travel stocks lead market rebound

Yahoo Finance's Emily McCormick breaks down how stocks are trading on Thursday afternoon.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Rachelle, let's take a look at the markets here. You mentioned the fact that we're seeing a bit of a rebound, some of that momentum carrying through for yet another day. The Dow up just around 2%. S&P holding onto gains. The NASDAQ once again the outperformer. Emily McCormick has the latest on that for us. Emily, what's driving today's gains?

EMILY MCCORMICK: Well, Seana, as you mentioned, we are seeing quite a bit of momentum actually picking up here in the markets. The S&P 500 on track for its second straight day of gains. We do have that index up more than 2% on an intraday basis here. And on a two-day basis, if we count the gains that we saw yesterday as well, up more than 3%. That's being led by the consumer discretionary sector. Only the real estate sector is actually in negative territory this afternoon.

Now, I do want to highlight a couple of areas of special interest in the markets today, one of those being travel. Now, as we can see, a lot of green across the screen here. And that's after Southwest, as well as JetBlue, actually raised their sales forecasts for the current quarter, really citing strong summer demand here. And as we can see, shares of Southwest are up nearly 7%-- no, yeah, nearly 7% on an intraday basis, more than 8% on a two-day basis. And if we look over the course of the year to date, Southwest also up by nearly 6%, although it is a little bit choppy when you take a look at that 2022 picture.

Now, one other area of the markets that I want to highlight is retail. Now, of course, we had seen Target and Walmart really sounding the alarm on the economic outlook in results posted last week. Much different picture when we look at the board this week and in today's session, especially. We have Dollar Tree especially up nearly 21%. And that's, of course, coming after this company actually raised its earnings forecast for the full year, really a sharp turnaround compared to what we saw from the likes of Target, Walmart, Abercrombie and Fitch in the past week or so. So, again, much better picture when we take a look at this retail board on an intraday basis, guys.

DAVE BRIGGS: Fantastic. We are exhaling. Thank you so much, Emily.