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U.S. crude oil falls below $90 a barrel, Coinbase stock pops on BlackRock partnership

Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferré breaks down markets on Thursday as crude oil falls below $90 a barrel for the first time since Russia invaded Ukraine, EV stocks are mixed, Chinese ADRs gain, and Coinbase stock surges.

Video Transcript

INES FERRE: The major average that is in the green right now, that being the NASDAQ, part of that has to do with consumer discretionary stocks and Amazon, which is slightly higher right now. Do want to point out WTI falling below $90 per barrel for the first time since the invasion of the Ukraine war. So if we just pull up a year to date chart, you can see, in late March, that's when that invasion happened. And so now you can see that, year to date, WTI is up 17%, really losing all of the gains since that Ukraine invasion.

Taking a look at equities, under the hood, we're watching consumer discretion, as I mentioned, communications services, which are slightly in the green. You've got energy that's lagging right now. Also, on the NASDAQ 100, as I had mentioned, Amazon is in the green. Tesla up more than 1 and 1/2 percent. Also, Tesla is considered a consumer discretionary stock.

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Looking also at the Chinese ADRs, these are in the green. Baba, after its quarterly results, had been up about 5% earlier this morning, losing some of that steam, but still up more than 3%. And then just looking at the electric vehicle space, we are seeing a little bit of a mixed picture here with these EV stocks after [INAUDIBLE] reported. Its quarterly results, that's down 9%. And check out the meme stocks, AMC more than a 2% higher right now. By the way, AMC will be reporting its results today after the close, guys.

- And we've also been watching shares of Coinbase, which are just going bonkers here on news of that partnership with BlackRock. I know we had at least one volatility halt.

INES FERRE: Yeah, that's right. And in fact, it's actually in our meme stock chart, as well. There's quite a bit of short interest on this stock. So part of what you could see is also a short squeeze after that announcement of the Black BlackRock partnership. This stock had been up 35% before that volatility halt, it's right now up 22%.

BlackRock, which by the way is the world's largest asset manager, is partnering with Coinbase. And BlackRock says that the focus of the partnership, initially, will be on Bitcoin. So this will make it easier for institutional investors to invest and trade Bitcoin.

Now, this is a bold move, because we know that there's been the crypto crash, the crypto winter, that's happening. And nevertheless, BlackRock getting involved with crypto, Bitcoin in particular, and Coinbase, which by the way, year to date, Coinbase still down 60%. So this is a much needed bump for this stock, guys.