Market check: S&P 500 on track to close with losses, energy makes intraday gains

Yahoo Finance markets reporter Jared Blikre examines today's market losses heading into the close, as well as the sector actions, Merck's historic movements in the pharmaceutical sector, Chinese stocks, and ARK ETF components.

Video Transcript

- --turn over to Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre for a closer look at the numbers. Hey there, Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Hey, there. Well, let's take a look at the Wi-Fi interactive here. As you said, the three majors in the red, but I would point out the Russell 2000 is still in the green. And let's take a 10,000-foot view here of the market. This is the S&P 500 over the last two months. Here's today's price action, just kind of digesting what happened here yesterday at multi-week highs. So we're heading into the end of the quarter. That means pension funds will be rebalancing. We're sitting on some heavy losses for a lot of sectors this month. And so there could be a flight into equities. In other words, the rally could potentially continue.

Now as you said, Dave, energy in the forefront today. That's up over 2%, crude oil bouncing back. Settled, I believe, $109 and change. That will be WTI. Also seeing utilities and health care in the green today. The mega caps discretionary-- that's consumer discretionary and communication services-- those are each down 1%.

I want to check out what's going on in the health care space because we have some record highs. Haven't been seeing a lot of those recently, but Merck record highs today, that's up 1 and 1/2 percent. So is Eli Lilly, and I believe Bristol-Myers Squibb's is as well. Notable, because I'm going to show you a 20-month, or 20-year chart here. We have surpassed the highs that we saw in the dotcom bubble crash. So very significant. Merck at record highs right now, so is Eli Lilly, and a couple of others here.

Want to move on and take a look at what's been happening inside the Chinese stocks. Now we've seen a lot of these flying high. Some of these are continuing the movement today. And you take a look at what's happened over the last month, some huge outperformers here. So if we do get a continuation of this rally into the final days of this quarter, might see some more action here and potentially in some of these beaten down or disruptive stocks as well, guys.

- Certainly a rocky period here as we go into, as you mentioned there, coming into the end of the quarter. Thank you so much, Jared Blikre there.