S&P 500 Hits Record as Energy Soars on Delay in OPEC+ Meeting By Investing.com

By Yasin Ebrahim

Investing.com – The S&P 500 hit a fresh intraday high Thursday, led by energy as oil prices remained well supported as OPEC+ postponed its meeting to Friday after struggling to reach consensus on supply.   

The S&P 500 rose 0.4% to a fresh intraday record of 4,319.30. The Dow Jones Industrial Average jumped 0.27%, or 94 points, the Nasdaq was up 0.01%. 

OPEC+ delayed its meeting by one day to Friday after a key member, the United Arab Emirates, was unwilling to go along with the reported preliminary deal – for a 0.5 million barrel per day hike – that Saudi Arabia and Russia struck on Thursday.

Oil prices remained near their highest level since October 2018 as  the potentially higher output is expected to absorbed comfortably by an undersupplied market amid robust demand.  

“In our opinion, such an increase [of 500,000 barrels per day in August] would hardly be able to prevent a further rise in oil prices given that OPEC estimates that the market will be 1.9 million barrels per day short in the second half of the year…,” Commerzbank (DE:CBKG) said in a note ahead of the decision.

The backdrop for cyclical stocks – those that move in tandem with economy – including energy were also supported by pointing to strength in the labor market ahead of the Friday’s monthly jobs numbers.

“We forecast nonfarm payrolls rose 620,000 in June following a 559,000 rise in May as we think employers ramped up recruitment efforts and increased compensation to draw people back into employment,” Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) said in a note.

Tech, meanwhile, was hurt by a weaker semiconductor stocks, paced by a decline in Micron (NASDAQ:MU).

Micron fell 5% as the some on Wall Street sound the alarm on the peak pricing, pointing to an easing supply shortage in the second half of the year.

Summit downgraded Micron to hold from buy, and said the peak will be brought on by the seasonal build in the chipmaker’s memory supply and customers switching inventory management to just-in-time from just-in-case inventory management.

Megacap tech, meanwhile, offered little to the broader market advanced as the fab 5 remained mostly lower.

Apart from Facebook (NASDAQ:FB), Google-parent Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL), and Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) were in the red.

In other news, Coinbase Global (NASDAQ:COIN) fell more than 3% after Mizuho said it remained on sidelines, reiterating its neutral trading as weaker cryptocurrency trading volumes are expected to weigh on crypto exchange’s growth for the remainder of 2021.