Market check: Stocks flat at open, bitcoin price jumps

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre breaks down how markets opened on Wednesday.

Video transcript

BRAD SMITH: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live, everyone. Major averages mixed as of right now. Let's get on over to Jared Blikre on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to get his perspective on what is taking place early in today's tape. Jared, great to see you.

JARED BLIKRE: Well, no, not a lot of socially acceptable volatility right now. Hats off to Steve Sosnick, who really did a bang up job in the office. I want to check out the two-day price action on the NASDAQ because yesterday, we had 97% of S&P 500 stocks close in the green. You can see the NASDAQ composite up 3 and 1/2% over the last two days, just a fraction of that today.

But taking a look inside the market, now this is going to be the S&P 500 on a two-month basis. This is what we've been tracking here. Just broke above the 50-day moving average and just barely above this nearly four-week trading range that we've just been chopping around in. And another saying that I like that I think ties into Sosnick's comments, if they don't scare you out, they wear you out. And that's kind of what's been happening here.

We shouldn't take this as a sign that the bottom is in, necessarily. But I am a firm believer that we could have a flashy bear market rally, especially given the huge negative sentiment, huge cash outlays, huge cash on the sideline, as witnessed by that B of A Global Fund Manager Survey Report that we saw yesterday.

So looking at consumer discretionary, communication services, and tech, those are the leaders. Those are the mega caps. Energy taking a little bit of a downdraft here. That's down 8/10 of a percent. And you take a look inside here-- Amazon, Tesla each up over 1%. We're going to need to see followthrough. Now that we've broken above this, we're going to need to see a few closes. If we break back below that S&P 500 level, guess what? That is a failed breakout.

Also got to take a look at crypto because crypto is trying to break out as well. You could see Bitcoin up 7%. It's nice to finally see some momentum in this sector, because we haven't seen a lot of that year to date. And here's that year to date chart of Bitcoin. Now, as you'll notice, we are just barely breaking out of this downward trendline. But we have broken out of this space. So, constructive in the short-term. It's a "show me" story in the longer term, guys.