Market check: Stocks extend into the green amid Jerome Powell comments on inflation

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre examines how stocks are digesting Fed Chair Powell's latest comments on inflation, in addition to sector leaders, semiconductor stocks, Home Depot, and Walmart.

Video transcript

- Let's take a look at where things stand here because we have just about an hour to go until the closing bell. All three of the major averages in the green. You're seeing investors finding a reason to buy today. S&P and NASDAQ extending their gains hitting-- they're trading around the highs of the session so far today. Some of the leaders here are some of those beaten down sectors that investors have been selling nonstop over the last couple of weeks. Let's kick it over to Jared Blikre for a closer look at some of these movers. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: That's right. And I want to go over the afternoon's price action. Pretty interesting to see what was happening as Powell was talking, and if you thought he might move the markets, you were right. We are right back up at the highs as you saw, Shannon, but we got a little bit of a swoon here on those hawkish comments about inflation, about having to raise rates above the neutral rate. You know the deal. But market's taking it in stride right now, so another update in the markets.

Now let's take a look at the sector action where we have a broad array here. We got materials, financials, tech industrials, consumer discretionary-- all of those are up more than 2%, so that is a broad based rally that we are seeing right now. Now if we go to some of our leaders, solar energy, that is a 10 ETF. That is up 5%, followed by the SOX. That is the Philly chip index. And we also have ARK Invest components, regional banks, transports, cannabis stocks, so you can see the risk-on rally really travels far here. And in terms of the semiconductors, the AMD is up 8%. That's on the Piper Sandler upgrade, and the whole sector is being lifted by this. A lot of these names have been beaten up, but they like the value play.

Now, I've got to show you something that's in the red, and that would be Walmart, which is having its worst day since the 1987 crash. Earlier in the day, it was the worst since my data going back to the late 1970s, but I want to show you a two year chart here. Put some candlesticks and you can see, it just erased all of this gain back to the trading level that we saw in February of last year. And you broaden this out to a five year chart, and you can see that all of this consolidation here resulted in a false break to the upside followed by a retest of this level here. Probably going to have to go down and test this level more fully before any kind of repair can be made. Suffice to say, a little bit of disappointment in the retail sector, but not Home Depot. They released earnings too. That stock is up 2.5%. Guys?