Market Midday: Stocks Higher, Diesel Hits Record, AMD Joins $1T Club • 9/21/26

0:00It's the NBC Business News Update Market Midday. I'm Jessica Ettinger. Wall Street's higher to start this new week of trading. Bond yields are ticking lower. Oil is ticking lower. The major averages all in the green this afternoon. The Dow is up 289 points. That's a half percent. Google shares leading the Dow higher now. They're up 2 percent. Nike's up 1.8 percent this afternoon. The S &P 500 index is now up 93 points. That's one and a quarter percent. The Nasdaq up 457 points, back above 27 ,000. That's 1.8 percent. Major chipmaker names are in the green. Look at AMD. Here's CNBC's Kelly Evans.

0:47AMD shares hitting the trillion dollar market cap line for the first time ever. This was the little sister. This was the ketchup company to NVIDIA. But an incredible move up almost 10 percent today. Now, you might ask why. Intel's up 9%, 10 % as well. Is it our friend Muse? This is a little consumer app. You're all probably familiar with it from Meta. Actually, maybe a lot of people still aren't. You see it hitting the zeitgeist. No idea if that's why. Muse is an app created by Facebook and Instagram parent Meta. It's called a personal AI agent. Morning Brew says it recently became the number one free app in Apple's U.S.

1:22App Store. Personal agents can be set up to buy your groceries, book a trip and schedule appointments, and more. Meta shares are up almost 9 % this afternoon. Other names are soaring this afternoon. Intel shares up almost 14%. Cerebris Systems up almost 5%. Qualcomm shares up 7.5 % this afternoon. Paramount Skydance reportedly close to an antitrust settlement with the state of California. Here's Wells Fargo's Steve Cahill on CNBC. Weeks and months had gone by where it didn't seem like the company and the attorney general in California were really having constructive conversations. It certainly looks like that's changed and it's not over till it's over, right?

2:06So this is a very politically charged situation, I think, for David Ellison and all the Paramount and Warner Brothers shareholders. So the complexity of this cannot be understated. The company really wants to get this deal done. And I assume that the state of California has a lot of vested interest in this deal being successful as well in terms of job creation and investment. So no reason that the two sides can't come together and make this work. U.S. crude oil down below$96 a barrel this afternoon. It appears Saudi Arabia has a successful workaround getting more oil out of the Strait of Hormuz.

2:42Here's Energy Aspect's Amrita Sen on CNBC. Instead of flowing around 4 million barrels per day through the pipeline, now Saudi Arabia is flowing about 4 million barrels per day through Hormuz. We've seen them take over several tankers, about 30, just to do the shuttles between their loading port and the ship-to-ship that needs to happen. Yesterday alone on our satellite tracking, we saw seven VLCCs load in Saudi Arabian ports. So they are really ramping up the Hormuz side of things. On average, their exports are around 4 million barrels per day now, pretty much where they were at or even slightly above where they were during most of the conflict.

3:20Today, AAA says the national average for a gallon of regular gas is$4.48 as American drivers deal with pain at the pump. Diesel fuel hitting a fresh record high this afternoon,$6.51 a gallon. Costco is teasing the return of a popular food court item. Not saying which one yet, but it could be the churro, which left two years ago, or the combo pizza, which fell off menus six years ago. Amazon announcing the fall Prime Day sale will return October 6th and 7th. Jessica Edinger, CNBC. Hey, Fidelity. Can I get a second opinion on stocks in the Fidelity app?

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