Traders work on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange at the opening bell on March 18, 2026.
Angela Weiss | Afp | Getty Images
U.S. equities pared losses on Thursday, while oil prices pulled back as Wall Street watched for more developments in the Iran war.
The S&P 500 fell 0.27% and closed at 6,606.49, while the Nasdaq Composite slid 0.28% to end at 22,090.69. The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 203.72 points, or 0.44%, and settled at 46,021.43. The indexes had made a comeback from session lows, when the Dow was down almost 500 points, or about 1.1%, and the S&P 500 and Nasdaq had fallen around 1% and 1.4%, respectively.
It was the second consecutive losing day for all three major averages.
U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude futures settled down about 0.2% at $96.14 a barrel. Brent crude futures, the international benchmark, advanced roughly 1.2% to settle at $108.65 per barrel, its highest close since July 2022.
Oil prices eased in post-settle trading as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu spoke to the media, saying that Israel was helping the U.S. “in intel and other means” to open the Strait of Hormuz. Netanyahu also said that Iran had lost the ability to enrich uranium and make ballistic missiles and that the war may end sooner than people think.
International oil prices had spiked earlier on the heels of Iran on Wednesday striking a key liquefied natural gas, or LNG, export facility in Qatar. That was in retaliation for Israel attacking Iran’s South Pars gas field.
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 3.8%. 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.
