Dow plunges by over 800 points, British pound and crude oil prices continue to slide

Yahoo Finance Live breaks down the volatility seen across markets, currency exchanges, and energy commodity trades.

Video transcript

SEANA SMITH: Dow, S&P, NASDAQ all firmly in the red, right around the lows of the sessions here as we enter the final hour of trading. You can see the Dow now below 30,000, looking at a five-day chart. Clearly, it has been a brutal week for the markets. Over the past five days, Dow now off just around 5%. On an intraday basis, the NASDAQ falling below 11,000, as we've seen a lot of these larger cap tech giants here getting hit, as we've seen rising rates.

Obviously, the strong dollar here weighing on the broader markets. S&P falling well below 3,700, now on track for 3,600. We had Goldman coming out today, lowering their year end target on the S&P. So certainly some fear in the market action today. And really, we can say that about the market action for the week.

Over the past five days, you can see the S&P off just over 5 and 1/2%. I want to pull up the VIX. The fear gauge index certainly very important here to keep an eye on. Spiking above 30 here, really shows some of the fear out there in the market right now. Also the 10-year yield pulling back just a bit, now off just around 2 basis points at 3.69. It did top 3.8 earlier in the session today.

Let's take a look at some of the sector action here because, again, we are seeing red across the board. Now, on an intraday basis, you're looking at energy off just over 7%, the XLE off 7%. Weakness in energy is a big story here in today's market. Consumer discretionary materials among the worst performers for the day.

And then taking a look at the past five days, a very similar picture here. All 11 of the S&P sectors in the red. Energy by far the laggard, off nearly 11%. Consumer discretionary, real estate here among the biggest laggards. Consumer staples, I guess you can say, it's the best performer of the bunch. It's still off, though, just around 3 and 1/2%.

All right, let's get you up to speed on the currency action here, driving a lot of the losses that we're seeing play out in the equities markets. You have the strong dollar clearly a headwind here for the market. The dollar index once again moving higher today. Jared Blikre has a closer look at that for us. Hey, Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: Hey there. Well, let's take a look at our heat map, which has to do with the currencies. And all this green and dark green is the US dollar strengthening. This is a five-day price action. I'm just going to show you what happened today only. The British pound up 3.7%. This is an astounding move by cable here. By the way, this is inverted. Usually, we look at the currency cross upside down. But 25% over the last year means a lot of consternation.

And I'm going to show you the max chart. Now we go back to the early 2000, but you can go all the way back to about the 1980s. We haven't seen a price here since the 1980s. We're talking about Margaret Thatcher. And what that means for all these currencies is more pain. And when we have these highly leveraged currencies, guess what? Institutions are forced to deleverage and sometimes sell their good holdings for bad holdings in order to raise cash for potential margin calls.

So let's take a look. I just want to show you. I'm writing this up for the weekend. And I have a graphic here prepared here. We have the Argentine peso and the Turkish lira tied basically for the top spot, weakening against the dollar by about 40%. Then we have the krona over in Sweden and the yen. Now, these are two developed market currencies.

And when you have this kind of action in foreign exchange in these markets, as I said, forced deleveraging could cause more pain. And we're seeing that play out this week, with the NASDAQ heading to the lowest price-- the Dow heading to the lowest price since November of 2020. All in all, not the best week for currencies, and much less, equities, guys.

DAVE BRIGGS: All right, thank you, Jared. Let's get over to Ines Ferre, who has a check on oil energy just absolutely crashing today. Hi there, Ines.

INES FERRE: Yeah, Dave, and crude closing out its fourth consecutive week of losses. Let's take a look at our YFi Interactive board. We're watching WTI, which closed below $80 a barrel at 78.74, its lowest close since early January. On a technical level, it could be heading towards $75. Then you're looking at brent crude, down more than 4 and 1/2%, closing just above $86 per barrel.

Why the declines? Well, the strong US dollar that Jared was just talking about, worries of a recession as central banks raise interest rates, and China still has that zero COVID policy, a big concern for demand going forward. Looking at some other energy products, we're looking at gasoline futures, which today also declined by more than 5%, and also natural gas punching below $7. In fact, a 12-day chart, you can see that natural gas is down almost 17%, guys.