US open: Stocks mixed as traders digest JOLTs numbers

dl wall street wall st new york city new york stock exchange nyse dow jones nasdaq street sign nyc united states usa america pb — Sharecast / Alessandro D Andrea via Pixabay

Wall Street trading got off to a mixed start on Tuesday as market participants continued to zero in on moves in the energy market.

As of 1520 BST, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 0.06% at 33,580.15, while the S&P 500 advanced 0.13% to 4,130.05 and the Nasdaq Composite came out the gate 0.22% firmer at 12,216.58.

The Dow opened 21.0 points lower on Tuesday, taking only a modest bite out of gains recorded in the previous session as the blue-chip index kicked off the second quarter in much the same way it wrapped up the first.

Investors were still focussed on oil prices after the opening bell, with West Texas Intermediate futures rising 1.17% to $81.36 per barrel, building on its biggest daily gain in almost 12 months, while Brent Crude futures advanced 0.86% to $85.66 per barrel. Tuesday morning's moves come after crude prices got a boost on Monday after OPEC+ announced it would slash output by 1.16m barrels of oil per day.

Comments from JP Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon were also drawing an amount of attention at the start of trading, with the bank's head honcho warning that the US banking crisis was far from being over.

"The current crisis is not yet over, and even when it is behind us, there will be repercussions from it for years to come," Dimon said. "Any crisis that damages Americans' trust in their banks damages all banks – a fact that was known even before this crisis. While it is true that this bank crisis 'benefited' larger banks due to the inflow of deposits they received from smaller institutions, the notion that this meltdown was good for them in any way is absurd."

On the macro front, US factory orders fell 0.7% in February, according to the Census Bureau, below January's revised 2.1% decrease but ahead of market expectations for a 0.5% decline. The drop, which marked the second consecutive month of decline in factory orders, came as demand for transport equipment was down 2.8% month-on-month.

Elsewhere, the number of job openings in the US fell by 632,000 to 9.9m in February, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the lowest level seen since May 2021 and short of market expectations for a print of 10.4m, potentially indicating that the labour market may have finally started to cool. Over the month, the largest decreases in job openings were in professional and business services, health care and social assistance, and transportation, warehousing, and utilities down 278,000, 150,000, and 145,000, respectively.

Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook Cook and Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland president Loretta Mester will deliver speeches at 1730 BST and 2245 BST, respectively.

No major corporate earnings were slated for release on Tuesday.

Reporting by Iain Gilbert at Sharecast.com

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