Stocks Just Had Their Best Day Since Iran War Began

A drop in oil prices on Monday helped send the US stock market to its best day since the war in Iran began.

• The S&P 500 rose 67.19 points, or 1%, to 6,699.38 for its biggest gain in five weeks.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 387.94 points, or 0.8, to 46,946.41.
• The Nasdaq composite rose 268.82 points, or 1.2%, to 22,374.18.

The driver for markets once again was the price of oil, the AP reports. A barrel of benchmark US crude fell 5.3% to settle at $93.50, easing some pressure off the economy after topping $102 earlier in the morning. Brent crude, the international standard, fell 2.8% to $100.21 per barrel after earlier getting as high as $106.50.

It's a reprieve, for now at least, after oil prices spiked from roughly $70 before the United States and Israel began their attacks on Iran. In response, Iran has nearly halted traffic through the narrow Strait of Hormuz, where a fifth of the world's oil typically sails from the Persian Gulf to customers worldwide. That has oil producers cutting production because their crude has nowhere to go. The worry in financial markets is that if the strait remains closed for a long time, it could keep enough oil off the market to drive inflation up to a debilitating level for the global economy.

On Wall Street, stocks of companies with big fuel bills helped lead the market thanks to falling oil prices. Norwegian Cruise Line Holdings steamed 5.1% higher, while United Airlines climbed 4.2% to trim their big losses for the year so far. National Storage Affiliates leaped 30% after Public Storage said it would buy its 69 million rentable square feet in an all-stock deal valued at $10.5 billion. Public Storage fell 1.7%. Dollar Tree rose 6.4% after reporting a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected, even as fewer shoppers visited its stores.

Nebius Group, a Dutch AI cloud company, saw its stock that trades in the United States leap 15% after announcing a five-year infrastructure contract with Meta Platforms that could be worth up to $27 billion. Nvidia, whose chips are powering much of the world's move into artificial-intelligence technology rose 1.6% as its CEO, Jensen Huang, talked up the tech's possibilities at an AI conference and said he foresaw $1 trillion in demand for AI chips through 2027. It was the strongest single force lifting the S&P 500.