Oil prices extended gains Wednesday as Middle East peace talks stuttered, though stocks mostly rose on the back of continued demand for all things linked to artificial intelligence.<\/p>\n
Despite President Trump’s assurances that the U.S. and Iran are edging closer to ending their three-month-long war and reopening the Strait of Hormuz, crude investors appear unmoved as they await solid progress.<\/p>\n
Uncertainty about a peace deal pushed oil prices up more than 1%, with both main contracts up around 5% this week.<\/p>\n
However, stocks extended their breathtaking rally, fueled by the tech sector and demand for artificial intelligence. Tokyo climbed more than 2%, helped by a more than 11% surge in chipmaker Tokyo Electron, while Advantest also jumped.<\/p>\n
Taipei was up a similar amount thanks to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s strong advance.<\/p>\n
Shanghai, Sydney, Singapore and Manila were also up, though Hong Kong, Wellington and Jakarta retreated. Seoul was closed for a holiday.<\/p>\n
The gains followed another record for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq on Wall Street, where chipmaker Marvell Technology soared more than 32% after Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang hailed it as the next trillion-dollar firm.<\/p>\n
Adding to the upbeat mood among equity traders was data showing U.S. job openings jumped in April to their highest level in 23 months.<\/p>\n
The reading comes ahead of employment data on Friday that could determine if the Federal Reserve will keep its benchmark rate stable or potentially hike borrowing costs to fight inflation.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Oil prices extended gains Wednesday as Middle East peace talks stuttered, though stocks mostly rose on the back…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681865,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,5620,34186,12,158238,801,803,133,129,3,45063,210369,21,19,22,20,25,24,1139],"class_list":["post-681864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-benjamin-netanyahu","tag-ceasefire","tag-donald-trump","tag-hezbollah","tag-iran","tag-israel","tag-kuwait","tag-middle-east","tag-news","tag-oil-and-gas","tag-strait-of-hormuz","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681864"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681864\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681865"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}