Stock Market Update

[BRIEFING.COM] The S&P 500 consumer discretionary sector is up 5.3%. The kicker is that the vast majority of the stocks in the sector are trading lower. The difference maker is the biggest consumer discretionary stock by market cap weight. That being Amazon (AMZN 269.90, +34.40, +14.61%), which is soaring after its report, not so much because of all the shopping on Amazon but because of all the interest in its AWS Cloud business, which delivered the best quarter of year-over-year growth (+36.7%) in 18 quarters.

Amazon is a story unto itself. The rest of the market is running into some difficulty with higher oil prices (WTI +1.9% to $85.17/bbl) and rising Treasury yields. Oh, and there is also the matter of Apple (AAPL 302.76, -30.66, -9.20%) being down 9% after issuing disappointing fiscal Q4 revenue guidance.

Strikingly, the S&P 500 energy sector (-1.2%) is among the biggest losers today despite the jump in oil prices. That is owed largely to Exxon Mobil (XOM 152.73, -4.24, -2.70%), which came up shy of Q2 EPS estimates. Fellow heavyweight Chevron (CVX 192.34, +0.03, +0.02%) is flat despite topping analysts' expectations for the second quarter.

Generally weak market conditions show up in an advance-decline line at the NYSE and Nasdaq that favors decliners by a better than 2-to-1 margin.