Wall Street Rally Adds to Tuesday's Big Gains

Stocks rushed higher worldwide and oil prices eased Wednesday as hopes built that the war with Iran could end soon. That's even though some of the signals investors saw as hopeful are already under dispute.

• The S&P 500 rose 46.80 points, or 0.7%, to 6,575.32 and added to its leap from the day before, which was its best since last spring. That followed even bigger gains for stock markets across Europe and Asia, including an 8.4% surge in South Korea.
• The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 224.23 points, or 0.5%, to 46,565.74.
• The Nasdaq composite rose 250.32 points, or 1.2%, to 21,840.95.

Oil prices also fell back toward $100 per barrel after President Trump said late Tuesday that the US military could end its offensive in two to three weeks, the AP reports. That added to optimism following tenuous signals of hope from earlier Tuesday that Wall Street latched onto, including a news report quoting Iran's president as saying that it has "the necessary will to end the war" as long as certain requirements are met, including "guarantees to prevent a recurrence of aggression."

On Wall Street, three out of every five stocks within the S&P 500 rose as Big Tech powered the move higher. Gains of 3.4% for Alphabet and 0.8% for Nvidia were two of the strongest forces lifting the S&P 500. Eli Lilly rallied 3.8% after US regulators approved its GLP-1 pill for weight loss. Such gains have pulled the S&P 500 back to within 5.8% of its all-time high set early this year. Just on Monday, the index briefly neared a 10% drop from its record, a steep-enough fall that professional investors have a name for it: a "correction."

• Nike sank 15.5% even though it reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than expected. Analysts said it gave some lackluster financial forecasts. Oil companies also fell with the price of crude. Exxon Mobil slumped 5.2%, and Chevron dropped 4.6%.

The worry on Wall Street has been that the war may last a long time and keep oil and natural gas from the Persian Gulf out of global markets, which could create a brutal blast of inflation. Hope has been quick to reverse to doubt on Wall Street, triggering manic swings back and forth for financial markets since the war with Iran began. Trump has also made statements that lifted markets, only to see the gains quickly disappear after increasing his military threats.

• Shortly before Wall Street began trading on Wednesday, Trump claimed in a post on his social media network that Iran "has just asked the United States of America for a CEASEFIRE!" But Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmail Baghaei, quickly called that claim "false and baseless," according to a report on Iranian state television.

Oil prices also remain high, even if they've eased recently. The price for a barrel of Brent crude oil, the international standard, was sitting around $101 following its declines, which is still up from roughly $70 before the war began. US gasoline prices rose again overnight to a national average of $4.06 per gallon, according to the auto club AAA. "De-escalation hopes have given markets a lift, but we think the effects of the war would, in many cases, persist even if the war did end soon," Thomas Mathews, head of markets, Asia Pacific at Capital Economics, said in a research note Wednesday.