Welcome to Markets Desk, here's what's moving the needle this hour.
Covert oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz are doing quiet work keeping energy prices in check despite the ongoing Iran conflict. Tankers are shuttling crude into the Gulf of Oman undetected, and that steady supply pressure is helping contain fears of an inflation spike driven by an energy shock.
Shifting to semiconductors, Applied Materials is trading more than twenty-five percent below its peak even as the company just posted record fiscal third-quarter revenue of nine point one billion dollars, up twenty-five percent year over year. That kind of disconnect between fundamentals and price action is exactly the sort of dislocation value-oriented investors tend to circle.
And in pharma, AbbVie's neuroscience division is quietly becoming the company's second major growth engine. Management now projects twelve point seven billion dollars in neuroscience sales this year, a figure that signals the business is no longer simply dependent on its legacy immunology franchise to carry the load.
That's the tape. Markets Desk, signing off the floor.
