WTI Crude Lowest in Five Weeks

News this morning is keeping pre-market futures alight while sending spot oil prices down: Iran State TV is openly discussing a draft for a peace deal with the U.S. that would end the war begun in the Islamic-governed nation on the last day of February. The devil, of course, will be in the details, but the Dow is up +131 points (after dipping momentarily into the red ahead of this news), the S&P 500 is +30 points, the Nasdaq +288 and the small-cap Russell 2000 +19.Meanwhile, West Texas Intermediate (WTI) oil is down -5.7% today to $88.50 per barrel (/bbl) — the lowest level in five weeks. Brent crude is down -4.7% to $94.90/bbl. While good news in that it helps oil prices relax so that domestic gasoline might come down from its $4.50 per gallon, on average, nationwide. Still, we’re +63% on oil prices since before the war started, and even if a peace deal were to be agreed upon by both sides today, it would take several months to get global oil supply back to normal.Lest we forget, the AI rally continues to keep the stock market strong, with memory chip giant Micron MU the latest corporation to surpass $1 trillion in market capitalization. Investors are celebrating by buying more: shares for the Boise-Idaho-based tech major are up +7.5% at this hour of the pre-market, adding to the +213.9% gains for the stock year to date, +830% over the past year.Q1 Retail Earnings Parade Continues: ANF, DKS, BBWIAbercrombie & Fitch ANF reported an impressive Q1 earnings beat this morning, reporting earnings of $1.47 per share versus $1.26 in the Zacks consensus. This is still a ways behind the year-ago tally of $1.59 per share, but amounts to a +16.36% positive surprise. Revenues of $1.11 billion, on the other hand missed expectations by -0.48%. Even still, the stock is climbing +6% in early trading, as the stock had been suppressed -40% year to date.DICK’S Sporting Goods DKS had a mirror-image mixed Q1 report this morning: it missed earnings estimates by a penny to $2.90 per share (down from $3.37 per share a year ago) on revenues which surpassed expectations by +2.00% to $5.16 billion in the quarter (way up from $3.17 billion a year ago). The acquisition of Foot Locker is the activating agent here. Shares are down -2% in today’s pre-market, but +17.8% year to date.Bath & Body Works BBWI shares are up +13% in today’s early session — swinging the stock into the green year to date — on earnings of +$0.32 per share beating the Zacks consensus by 3 cents, and revenues of $1.38 billion advancing past estimates by +1.01%. Sales are still down year over year, as we’ve seen with these other retailers reporting this morning.After today’s close, we’ll see Q1 earnings reports from Salesforce CRM and Marvell Technology MRVL hit the tape. Both are expected to have grown nicely on the earnings side: +20.9% for CRM and +29% for MRVL, year over year, with +12.5% revenue growth for streaming service giant Salesforce and +26.8% for semiconductor major Marvell, which continues to trade at all-time highs this morning.Beyond Nvidia: AI's Second Wave Is HereThe AI revolution has already minted millionaires. But the stocks everyone knows about aren't likely to keep delivering the biggest profits. AI’s second wave is moving from infrastructure to implementation and these companies are at the forefront of this transition, positioned to become what Amazon and Google were to the internet era.See Stocks Now >>This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).Zacks Investment ResearchWeiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Zacks Weiter zum vollständigen Artikel bei Zacks