Stocks rise, commodities at inflection point, crypto fallout continues

Yahoo Finance’s Jared Blikre breaks down how markets opened on Tuesday.

Video Transcript

BRAD SMITH: Welcome back to Yahoo Finance Live, everyone. Markets have opened higher across the board here. You're seeing green on the screen for the Dow, the NASDAQ, and the S&P 500 here. Let's get on over to the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to our own Jared Blikre to get a look at what's at play in today's tape thus far, Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Well, looking at the Russell 2000 here on the YFi Interactive, it is up 2%. And it's been on a little bit of a tear recently, but still in a trading range. I'm going to skip over to the S&P 500, pull up a two-month chart. And we are entering the fourth week now of a very choppy price action period here. Let's see if I can get those candlesticks up.

There we go, four weeks in the making right there. So really nothing to talk about on that front. The action has definitely been in the bond market. We want to check out the VIX of the bond market. And that's heading down there. That's still a two-month chart right there. But really, the action that I've been seeing is in the US dollar. Let me pull up a year-to-date. I'm going to draw a trend line here.

This is a very, very simple technical analysis tool. If the price were to crash through this line, that would be-- probably gain some momentum here, given the fact that it's held for about six months. And then you take a look conversely at what's been happening with crude oil. And let's not forget commodities are denominated in the dollar here. See if we can pull that up.

Crude oil also potentially at an inflection point. I think all the more notable that even as most commodities have crashed, crude oil has not. It's still down 20%, but not the 50% that some of them are. So here's that trend line I'm looking at in crude oil. And if the dollar were to crash through that prior uptrend level, I would expect for crude to be able to rally through that. It would also have important implications for risk assets.

So let me focus on the day here for a second before I get into the general market and some crypto talk. We have energy and materials. Those are leading. The US dollar down big today. That has been the driver of the risk-on action. If that were to reverse, if that trend line were to be respected, I would expect the risk-on nature of the markets to abate here.

Finally got to land on crypto because we got some news in crypto land. There's more fallout from all of the failures, Celsius and otherwise, Arrowhead, all those loans going bad. And today, we got notice. We got a Bloomberg story talking about Scaramucci, friend of the show. One of his funds-- I believe it's one of the Legion series-- suspending redemptions until September.

The markets are on a knife edge. We were talking about that B of A Global Fund Manager survey report. That is key. That is key because if we were to have a Lehman event-- it hasn't happened yet-- that would probably be the final straw for a lot of funds. If we don't and get through this, should have a bunker, a bunker rally, in the Q3.

So here's Bitcoin, 22,306, highest price in a few weeks. Nice to see that perking up. But we need to get some momentum to the upside. And I think that's going to come with momentum to the downside in the US dollar. We'll have to see if that comes, guys.