Market check: Tech leads U.S. stocks higher, bitcoin rallies, European stocks move up

Yahoo Finance's Jared Blikre examines the market and takes a look at the financial, travel, and tech sectors.

Video transcript

BRAD SMITH: Let's begin things with the markets to let you know where things stand as we come into this, the 12:00 noon hour. And for that, I want to bring in Yahoo Finance's own Jared Blikre. Jared.

JARED BLIKRE: You bet. And let's take a look. We just saw Europe settle in the green about 30 minutes ago. You can see the DAX in Frankfurt, CAC 40 in Paris, all up 2%. And then in London, the FTSE up just over 1%. Want to show you the NASDAQ here. It's up over 2% today, maintaining its gains at the highs.

You take a look at what's happening over the last five days, you can see some volatility there, especially when we apply the candlesticks, but really just bumping up against this potential resistance level. I don't think anything major is going to happen for a couple of hours.

But here's what could happen and let's take a look inside the market at some of our heat maps here. And I'm in suspense too. Here's the bank, we were just looking at those in the last hour. JP Morgan down 2%-- up 2%, excuse me. Morgan Stanley up 2% as well.

But when you look at the sector action today, it's a nice-- nice spread, tech is in the forefront. That's XLK over here, that's up over 2 and 1/2%. Consumer discretionary, that is up about 1 and 1/2%. Those are the two outperformers, so those housed some of the mega caps.

But right behind the S&P 500 is financials, energy. So really the value and also the growth trade is up today. And then you look at some of the laggards here. You notice everything's in the green, but staples, utilities, those are the laggards, those are the defensive sectors. And so that's what you want to see when you're in rally mode.

But of course, everything can change when Powell takes the lectern. Now let's take a look at the travel sector. We've got Airbnb up 3 and 1/2%. It had a nasty slide, down about 10% earlier in the week. Avis Budget Group, that's up 5%. And then Carnival Cruise line and Norwegian up 3% and 4% respectively.

Want to get to some of the commodity action, because crude oil is on fire. Brent above $90 for the first time since 2014. That's pretty impressive here. And we'll just get a look at WTI as well, that is almost up. I think it is now exceeded its prior high from a few days ago and that would be the highest since 2014 as well.

So oil really on fire here, but you look at our commodities heat map, palladium and natural gas. Palladium is up 8%, that is used as an industrial metal. And then natural gas, we all know the story behind that. The energy crisis in Europe and whatnot. But energy really on fire here. And also, I want to take a look at Bitcoin.

We have Bitcoin up 3 and 1/2%, Ether up 7%, but it's really all about the rejection of the 33,000 level. Now we didn't quite hit it the other day, that was on this nasty down slide that we also got in stocks. But nice to see Bitcoin recovering a bit here. And it looks like we got a little bit of time.

So I'm going to go through some of our heat maps in the tech sector, because that is a leading sector today. And we can see Nvidia up 4%, Texas Instruments up 5%, and Applied Materials up 4 and 1/2%.