Markets rally as coronavirus fatalities near 84K

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre breaks down the latest market action. He joins the On The Move panel to discuss.

Video Transcript

JULIE HYMAN: You're watching Yahoo Finance Live. I'm Julie Hyman. Thank you for joining us. We are seeing markets rally today. We'll see if that holds through the close, unlike yesterday. The S&P 500 right now is up by some 2.1%. This even as we get more information on the economic toll of the coronavirus, McDonald's reporting its March same store sales fell by 22%.

Couple of other headlines for you, Bernie Sanders announced he is indeed dropping out or suspending his campaign for president, making Joe Biden more of the presumptive nominee at this point, barring any other unexpected developments.

And the latest numbers on coronavirus from Johns Hopkins University, 1.45 million cases globally, the count approaching 400,000 here in the United States, and the death toll worldwide approaching 84,000.

This-- we are getting perhaps some more encouraging news from Dr. Anthony Fauci. He spoke to Fox News this morning and said we could be approaching a turnaround in the number of new cases. He also said the ultimate death toll in the United States looks like it is going to be lower than previous estimates.

All of this has helped to boost the markets here today. And we're going to toss it on over to Jared Blikre, who has been watching developments there in stocks today. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Hey, there. We have a broad base rally underway. We can see the Dow is up nearly 500 points, or over 2%. NASDAQ lagging a little bit, up 1.7%, and the S&P 500 right around 2%. And we'll take a look at the intraday price action here. And after gapping up here and coming down nearly to the unchanged, it was away, away, away.

And it's nice to see a rally like that, kind of contrasting what happened yesterday where we gapped up, and we've just kind of came down into the close. But as we can see, still have a little bit of territory to gain to reclaim yesterday's highs around 2750, which is a major resistance point.

Also going to take a look at the Russell 2000. That is outperforming, up 3.6% today. Now the 10-year T-note yield is only up 1 basis point today, but over the last five days, it has been trending up, up substantially about 20 basis points there. US dollar index also just barely climbing here, but not anywhere near those highs, those multi-year highs we saw earlier in the week.

And also taking a look at crude because crude is up for the first time in just a couple days here. And we can see that it's really not making a dent against those highs we saw when there were expectations for the Saudis and OPEC [INAUDIBLE] in fact, the whole world to cut about 10 to 15 million barrels.

And then gold. Gold on a nice run here. We can see a little bit down after that seven-year high that we saw the other day, but still holding right just under 1,700. So let's take a look at the Dow heat map really quickly. We can see lots of green there, Julie, even McDonald's up 1%.

JULIE HYMAN: Jared, thank you.