Stock Market News for Mar 17, 2026

U.S. stock markets closed higher on Monday rebounding from the trough of 2026. A decline in crude oil prices eased concerns about higher inflationary pressure to some extent. Moreover, AI trade regained some of its lost ground. All three major stock indexes ended in positive territory.

How Did The Benchmarks Perform?

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) advanced 0.8% or 387.94 points to close at 46,946.41. At the intraday high, the index was up nearly 230 points. Notably, 25 components of the 30-stock index ended in positive territory while four ended in negative territory and one remained unchanged.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite finished at 22,374.18, gaining 1.2% or 268.82 points owing to the strong performance by technology bigwigs. At intraday high, the tech-laden index was up more than 416 points.

The S&P 500 rose 1% to finish at 6,699.38. However, six out of 11 sectors of the broad-market index ended in negative territory while five ended in positive territory. The Utilities Select Sector SPDR (XLU) rose 1% while the Materials Select Sector SPDR (XLB) fell 1%, respectively. 

The fear gauge CBOE Volatility Index (VIX) was down 13.5% to 23.51. A total of 17.4 billion shares were traded on Monday, lower than the last 20-session average of 19.9 billion. The S&P 500 recorded 16 new 52-week highs and 10 new 52-week lows. The Nasdaq posted 51 new 52-week highs and 138 new 52-week lows.

Crude Oil Prices Ease

The geopolitical conflicts in the Middle East remained heightened. Iran continued to retaliate against the U.S.-Israel joint attack and the largest crude oil supply line through the Strait of Hormuz remained heavily disturbed. Despite this, crude oil prices eased yesterday.

Last week, the 32 countries of the International Energy Agency (IEA) agreed to release 400 million barrels of crude oil to normalize global oil supply. This marked the largest such action in IEA’s history. Moreover, OPEC said that Saudi Arabia has also ramped up oil production. 

The U.S. benchmark West Texas Intermediate (WTI) futures slipped 5.3% to settle at $93.50 per barrel. The global benchmark — the Brent futures — settled down 2.8% to $100.21 per barrel. 

AI Trades Regain Mojo

NVIDIA Corp. NVDA — the global generative AI-based GPU behemoth — provided a rosy picture at its annual developer conference. CEO Jensen Huang said that the company expects total purchase orders for its Blackwell and Vera Rubin chip platforms to reach $1 trillion by 2027. This indicates a significant upward revision from the sales projection of $500 billion in 2025. 

In addition, Huang announced that major auto makers like Nissan, BYD, Geely, Isuzu and Hyundai are building level 4 autonomous vehicles (EV) on NVIDIA’s Drive Hyperion program. NVIDIA diversified into AI chips for EVs as a new source of significant revenue generation.

Social media giant Meta Platforms Inc.META entered into a mega $27 billion deal for five years with cloud computing provider Nebius Group N.V.NBIS for its AI infrastructure. The AI-powered cloud infrastructure provider will install $12 billion of dedicated capacity across a number of locations for Meta Platforms. The social media giant is also committed to purchasing additional available compute capacity from Nebius, worth up to a total of $15 billion over five years.

Consequently, stock prices of Nebius, Meta and NVIDIA advanced 15%, 2.3% and 1.7%, respectively. NVIDIA currently carries a Zacks Rank #2 (Buy). You can see the complete list of today’s Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.

Economic Data

Industrial production rose 0.2% in February, higher than the Zacks Consensus Estimate of a break-even. The metric for January was 0.7%. In February, manufacturing output rose 0.2 %, and mining grew 0.8% while utilities output fell 0.6%.

Capacity utilization rose to 76.3% in February, marginally below the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 76.4%. The metric for January was revised marginally upward to 76.3% from 76.2% reported earlier.

The NY Empire State Index for manufacturing unexpectedly fell to -0.2, significantly below the Zacks Consensus Estimate of 4.1. The metric for January was 7.1. 

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This article originally published on Zacks Investment Research (zacks.com).

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