Market check: Stocks rise, Dow rallies for 4th day

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

Video transcript

JARED BLIKRE: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live, and a quick check of the markets here. We have the Dow in rally mode. It's up 400 points, up 1.2%. Just want to show you an intraday chart here. But let's take a look at what's happened over the trailing five days, and let's actually do the last four days, because we are in the midst of a four-day rally. And you can see it's up about 4% over that time period.

Now, I want to take a longer term view of the S&P 500. So we're going to go to a year to date candlestick chart that we've been plotting for some time since literally the beginning of the year. And you can see, we have the beginning of a potential upswing here. Now a phrase that I've been saying a lot lately that I really like, coined by Brian Shannon, founder of Alpha Trends, if they don't scare you out, they wear you out, meaning, it takes pain or frustration to end a bear market.

And even though the S&P 500 didn't officially cross that threshold just yet, at least on a closing basis, we are in a bear market. So we could get a flashy rally. We could end up in this territory. We could also go up to 4,300, maybe even 4,500. We'll have to see. But the problem is, I don't think there's been enough pain and/or frustration yet. So you can have corrections in time. You can also have corrections in price. And, well, I don't think we're quite there yet.

So consumer discretionary, we've been talking about the retail sector, those stocks flying high. Williams-Sonoma was up about 10%. And we are also seeing some strength in industrials and financials and materials. All of those are outperforming, all up more than 1%. To the downside, we have healthcare. That is-- not downside. That's to the less upside. Healthcare, that's up about half a percent. So is real estate and utilities. So the defensive sectors are lagging here.

And I want to check in on some of our leaders and sentiment indicators. And we've got KWEB. That is a Chinese ETF. That's up 5%. Let's just stop there, roll over to China, because I want to show you what's happening with Alibaba. We were just talking about, this was printing negative in the pre-market. And this is off of their earnings announcement. They are retooling their entire business with the help of the Chinese government, the friendly help, I'm sure.

And here is a year to date look. You can see it's down 24%. But to be able to rally off of this news, I think is an important sentiment indicator. So I guess to wrap up here, well, we have some positive signs, but it's too early to tell if we have anything meaningful coming from this. Coming--