Good evening and welcome to Markets Desk, your end-of-week read on what moved markets today.
Crude oil surged sharply on Friday, with West Texas Intermediate closing up more than four percent to post a five-week high. The catalyst was a fresh escalation in US-Iran hostilities, which sent energy traders scrambling for cover and pushed RBOB gasoline futures to a two-month high in the same session.
Away from energy, the equity story this week was really about rotation. Semiconductors struggled while the average stock quietly outperformed, a dynamic that market veterans tend to read as a sign of underlying health. When leadership broadens beyond a handful of chip names, it suggests the rally has real structural support rather than a narrow, fragile base.
That context matters when you look at the wreckage inside the tech trade. Nineteen mostly technology stocks dropped at least twenty-five percent in July alone, a painful month for names that had run extraordinarily hard. Notably, seven of those worst performers were still up by triple digits on the year, which tells you just how violent the moves in both directions have been in two thousand twenty six.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
