Wall Street hesitates and oil prices climb with uncertainty about the Strait of Hormuz
NEW YORK (AP) – U.S. stocks are holding tentatively near their record heights, while oil prices climb with uncertainty about when oil tankers can resume crossing the Strait of Hormuz and restore the world’s flow of crude. The S&P 500 fell 0.1% early Monday. The index is coming off its latest all-time high. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 174 points, and the Nasdaq composite rose less than 0.1%. Brent crude briefly topped $114 a barrel. Uncertainty rose after Iranian news agencies claimed Iran had struck a U.S. Navy vessel southeast of the Strait of Hormuz, a claim the U.S. military rejected.
THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. AP’s earlier story follows below.
Wall Street dipped and oil prices jumped early Monday on conflicting reports of a strike by Iran on a U.S. Navy vessel outside of the Strait of Hormuz.
Futures for the S&P 500 were down 0.2% before the opening bell, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.5%. Nasdaq futures dipped 0.1%.
Oil prices initially jumped 5% on the news that a U.S. ship had been hit, but is now trading between 2% and 3% higher after the U.S. military denied the attack.
The U.S. remains active near the Persian Gulf and President Donald Trump said the US would guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz, but offered few details.
Iranian news agencies – including the semiofficial agency Fars and the Iranian Labour News Agency – claimed that Iran had struck a U.S. Navy vessel southeast of the strait of Hormuz, accusing it of “violating maritime security and navigation norms.”
The price of a barrel of U.S. benchmark crude was up $2.18 at $104.12 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, jumped $3.06 to $111.23 a barrel.
In corporate news, shares of eBay soared as Ryan Cohen’s GameStop pursues an approximately $56 billion takeover of company, seeing it as a vehicle to compete with online retail giant Amazon.
The national gaming retailer said that its approximately 1,600 U.S. stores could become drop-off and shipping locations.
GameStop shares were down 2.6% in premarket trading while eBay shares climbed close to 8%. GameStop said that it started accumulating shares in eBay beginning in February and currently has a 5% stake.
Attention in recent weeks has been split between the impacts of the Middle East conflict and corporate earnings.
Much hinges, analysts say, on progress toward ending the war with Iran and unlocking the shipping bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz.
The oil market “remains the fulcrum, with hundreds of tankers, bulk carriers, and cargo ships still stranded across the Gulf, idling as storage constraints force producers to shut … production simply because there is nowhere left to store it,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.
Thousands of seafarers, many on oil tankers or cargo ships, have been stuck in the Persian Gulf since the war began. Those aboard described to The Associated Press intercepted drones and missiles exploding over the body of water as their vessels run low on drinking water, food and other supplies.
Trump said his “Project Freedom,” an effort to “guide” ships out of the strait, would begin Monday morning in the Middle East. The U.S. Central Command said it would involve guided-missile destroyers, more than 100 aircraft and 15,000 service members, but the Pentagon did not immediately answer questions about how they would be deployed.
Offsetting some of the stalemate in Iran are strong corporate earnings. U.S. companies have exceeded expectations for the first three months of the year despite rising inflation, soaring gas prices, and a sense of growing unease among Americans about the war and the U.S. economy
Reporting earnings this week are Palantir, The Walt Disney Co., DoorDash, Uber and McDonald’s.
A trove of labor market data is also scheduled for release this week, including job openings for March, the latest weekly layoffs report. The more comprehensive April jobs report lands on Friday.
In Europe at midday, Germany’s DAX was 0.3% lower, while the CAC 40 in Paris declined 1%. Markets in Britain were closed for a holiday.
In Asian trading, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng jumped 1.2% to 26,095.88.
Markets in mainland China and Japan were closed for “Golden Week” holidays.
Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.4% to 8,697.10.
Strong buying of tech stocks pushed shares in South Korea sharply higher, as the Kospi gained 5.1% to 6,936.99. Samsung Electronics’ shares surged 5.4%.
In Taiwan, the Taiex leaped 4.6% as shares in computer chipmaker TSMC, the market heavyweight, shot up 6.6%.
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