Stocks fall again as oil prices rise, Dow loses 300 points: Live updates

U.S. equities fell on Thursday, while oil prices remained elevated as Wall Street watches for more developments in the Iran war.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average was down 351 points, or 0.8%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite slipped 0.7% and 0.8%, respectively. The S&P 500 traded below its 200-day moving average for the first time since May 23. The Russell 2000 index, meanwhile, fell 0.5% and was approaching correction territory with a decline of close to 10% from its 52-week high. The Dow is next in line, as it is down 9.2% from its recent high.

Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, rose 1% to $109 a barrel. West Texas Intermediate crude futures were up 1% at $97 a barrel.

The spike in international oil follows Iran striking a key liquefied natural gas (LNG) export facility in Qatar as well as an attack on Iran’s South Pars gas field by Israel. Iran then retaliated by hitting Qatari energy facilities.

President Donald Trump warned that if more facilities in Qatar were attacked, the U.S. would “massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars Gas Field.”

“The core dilemma of the entire situation remains the same: the U.S. and Israel have ‘won’ the war in a conventional sense, but there doesn’t seem to be a military solution for reopening Hormuz absent the deployment of ground troops, which means the waterway isn’t likely to return to normal without some type a diplomatic settlement (and it doesn’t appear at the moment like much effort is being put into achieving one),” said Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge.

With traffic in the key Strait of Hormuz passageway largely at a standstill, the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Japan expressed in a joint statement Thursday their “readiness to contribute to appropriate efforts to ensure safe passage through the Strait.”

“For the first couple of weeks of the war, people thought, ‘Okay, this is terrible. How can you not have the Strait open. This is going to cause major supply disruptions.’ But there was always this belief that, ‘It’s going to end very soon. It’s going to end any day. This is not sustainable,'” Peter Boockvar, chief investment officer at One Point BFG Wealth Partners, said to CNBC.

Now, as the conflict approaches its fourth week, the current circumstances have left investors thinking, “Well, maybe this doesn’t end so fast, and even when it does, we’re certainly not going back to levels in commodity prices prior to the beginning of the war,” he continued. “There’s no way, in my opinion, that oil is going back to $65 a barrel.”

Besides the worries surrounding oil prices, Boockvar believes the mounting concerns in both technology and private credit prior to the war will persist beyond it, meaning investors are going to have to be even “more discerning” with portfolio management moving forward, he added.

In tech, Micron Technology shares came under pressure Thursday, losing 3%. Citi analysts in particular attributed the move to just “some profit taking,” given that a memory supply shortage helped the semiconductor company nearly triple its revenue in its most recent quarter.