Market Recap: Tuesday, June 2

Stocks closed at session highs on Tuesday, with the Dow ending 267 points higher, as reopening hopes offset continuing protests across the U.S. The energy sector outperformed the broader market as crude oil prices settled at a three-month high.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Welcome back to "The Final Round" here on Yahoo Finance. I'm Seana Smith. We have stocks holding onto gains today despite the protests and riots taking place across the country. All three major averages ending the day in the green. The Dow up over 1%. Most have seen pretty solid gains from the S&P up just around 8/10 of a percent and the NASDAQ up around 6/10 of a percent.

I also want to mention a big move that we saw in oil today. The price of oil jumping just around 4%, closing at its highest level in about three months. Now, this move to the upside comes amid reports that major crude products, or producers I should say, are reportedly going to extend their output cuts that are scheduled to taper at the end of this month.

So crude today closing well above $36 a barrel. And of course, we also have stocks that are tied to the reopening of states outperforming once again today. Banks, for example, names like Wells Fargo, Citi, JP Morgan all moving to the upside. We also had a number of retailers holding onto gains today, GAP, Nordstrom, and Macy's amongst some of the winners in that sector.

And I want to bring in my co-host Myles Udland, and Myles, I guess my question is what stands out in the markets today to you? Because it's pretty much a continuation of kind of the theme that we've been talking about so far this week that markets are kind of shrugging off all the risk out there, and we're still seeing the Dow up over 250 points today.

MYLES UDLAND: Yeah. I mean, I think, look, we can continue to talk about this divergence between the market and the real economy till we're blue in the face, and frankly we have, but there are things that we can more concretely look at and say, here's why the market continues to act the way it does. And I think, you know, look at what's coming up the next three days.

Tomorrow morning we're going to get private payrolls data from ADP, then we're going to get initial jobless claims, and then we'll get the jobs report. And there was a really interesting note from Nick Colas over at DataTrack this morning, and he highlighted how in past recessions-- and this is every recession going back to World War II-- no matter how high the unemployment rate jumped initially, once it stopped rising, that was it. There's no like W shape in the unemployment rate.

Now, that might happen during this recession. We'll see what the economy looks like in the first half of say 2021, but I think what the market has been looking at is that when we're getting in the next three days, this batch of labor market data, this is it. This is the absolute worst we're going to see. And even though the numbers are quite depressing, a depression like, they're not going to get any worse, and that is ultimately what the equity markets focuses on.

And I mean, I know in some ways that's an oversimplification, we can get into the Fed and all these other dynamics, which companies are large in those markets, so on and so forth, but quite simply, the market doesn't think that the labor market, which is essentially the health of the US economy, is going to get any worse, and I think that's good enough for right now.