By CHAN HO-HIM and MATT OTT, AP Business Writers<\/p>\n
Wall Street futures were rising in premarket trading Monday and oil prices retreated, but not before a gallon of gas in the U.S. breached the $4 level again.<\/p>\n
Futures for the S&P 500 rose 0.6%, while Nasdaq futures jumped 1.1%. Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average, coming off its worst week since March, reversed course from losses to a gain of 0.4%.<\/p>\n
Domino\u2019s jumped more than 7% after the pizza delivery giant beat second-quarter revenue projections and announced another round of stock buybacks. The company fell short of Wall Street\u2019s profit targets, even as its net income grew 3.6% over the same period last year.<\/p>\n
AMC soared close to 15% in off-hours trading after the movie theater chain posted record second-quarter sales and profit. Those figures didn\u2019t even include the past weekend, when the 106-year-old theater company said 4.3 million people watched \u201cThe Odyssey\u201d in its theaters. Six of its theaters even ran the Christopher Nolan-directed historical epic non-stop over the weekend \u2014 85 hours straight \u2014 to meet demand.<\/p>\n
Oil prices flipped from gains to losses as the U.S. and Iran moved closer to resuming an all-out war<\/a>. Early Monday, the U.S. announced more attacks for a ninth straight night. Iran has been responding to U.S. strikes by hitting U.S. allies across the Middle East.<\/p>\n Brent crude, the international standard, fell $1.64 to $86.46 per barrel but still remained much higher than prewar levels. Benchmark U.S. crude dropped $1.87 to $79.91 per barrel.<\/p>\n \u201cThe U.S. and Iran continue to exchange strikes, which are proving to be deadly for both sides,\u201d ING commodities strategists Warren Patterson and Ewa Manthey wrote in a commentary Monday. \u201cIf this escalation goes unchecked, we could return to an environment of wide-scale attacks across the Persian Gulf.\u201d<\/p>\n Tanker traffic in the Strait of Hormuz<\/a>, a crucial waterway for global oil transport, has nearly ground to a halt, adding to pressures on supplies, they noted. On Monday, U.S. gas prices again surged to<\/a> an average of $4 a gallon.<\/p>\n \u201cThe return to war in the Strait of Hormuz may start to weigh more heavily on financial markets before too long, especially if even strong tech earnings reports continue to be met with skepticism,\u201d Jonas Goltermann, chief markets economist at Capital Economics wrote in a note Monday.<\/p>\n Markets were also shaken by the rollout of another powerful Chinese AI model<\/a>, this time by Beijing-based Moonshot AI<\/a>.<\/p>\n The impact of the new Kimi K3<\/a> open-source AI model was similar to when China\u2019s \u201c DeepSeek<\/a> moment\u201d rattled world markets in early 2025. It was viewed as another sign of how lower-cost, capable Chinese AI models are increasingly challenging rivals like Anthropic\u2019s Claude and OpenAI\u2019s GPT.<\/p>\n At midday in Europe, Britain\u2019s FTSE 100 fell 0.4%, France\u2019s CAC 40 was up 0.6% as was Germany\u2019s DAX.<\/p>\n In Asia, Japan\u2019s markets were closed Monday for a holiday. South Korea\u2019s Kospi, which has benefited substantially from the global AI frenzy<\/a>, sank 4.5% to 6,516.27. Two of its most valuable stocks booked losses. Samsung Electronics lost 4.3%, while memory chipmaker SK Hynix fell 4.2%.<\/p>\n