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Update: US Equity Indexes Jump as Communication Services Rally While Crude Oil Slides With Treasury Yields
(Updates with index/price moves and company/geopolitical news from the first paragraph.)US equity indexes rose amid strong gains in communications services and a slide in government bond yields, coupled with a drop in crude oil futures, supporting President Donald Trump's version of the state of Iran peace negotiations.The Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.1% to 25,913.90, with the S&P 500 up 1.5% to 7,600.50 and the Dow Jones Industrial Average higher by 1.3% to 53,178.41 on Monday.Communication services surged 4.3%, topping sectors, followed by consumer discretionary and technology. Energy, consumer staples, and health care were the sole decliners.Alphabet's (GOOG, GOOGL) Google signed a 15-year power purchase agreement for the total energy output from RWE's 155-megawatt Crooked Creek solar project in McCurtain County, Oklahoma, RWE said Monday. Shares of Alphabet jumped 4.9%, the top gainer on the Dow.Amazon.com's (AMZN) web services unit and Superblocks unveiled a multi-year collaboration to bring the latter's generative AI platform to customers' AWS environments, including Amazon Bedrock. Shares of Amazon advanced 4.6%, one of the biggest outperformers on the Dow, the S&P 500, and the Nasdaq.Alibaba (BABA) launched Qwen3.8-Max, its latest large language model, and plans to release the model's open weights next week alongside Qwen3.8-27B.President Donald Trump said his latest offer of talks is a "last chance" for Iran after he called off what he said was a major attack on the Islamic Republic, Bloomberg reported. "I want to give them every last chance before decapitation," Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, according to Bloomberg. "You'll find out today or tomorrow. I mean, they're going to go quickly, one way or the other. It's not very complex."Iran's Foreign Ministry Spokesman Esmaeil Baghaei said no negotiations with the US were underway and no meetings were scheduled, Reuters reported.Oman and Iran have been negotiating over a new maritime route through the Strait of Hormuz, which borders both their territorial waters, Al Jazeera, a Middle Eastern broadcaster, reported. Sunday night, Iran's Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi told the Iranian cabinet in a report that negotiations between Tehran and Muscat were "on the way to being finalized".The front-month US West Texas Intermediate crude oil slumped 5.3% to $80.15 a barrel, and global benchmark North Sea Brent dropped 4.8% to $83.70 a barrel.Most US Treasury yields declined, with the 10-year trading down 6.7 basis points to 4.68%, retreating from the 52-week high touched late last week. The two-year yield dropped 5.2 basis points to 4.24%.In economic news, the Institute for Supply Management's US manufacturing index rose to 55.6 in July from 53.3 in June, compared with expectations for 53.9 in a Bloomberg-compiled survey. This is the highest reading since May 2022, ISM said."The increase in New Orders and Production, along with an increase in Order Backlogs and Employment suggests that manufacturing businesses are becoming more comfortable with the idea of expanding capacity," Thomas Simons, Jefferies Chief Economist, said in a note. "Comments from some respondents suggest that the AI infrastructure build out has accelerated to a new phase."
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