Wall Street retreats, oil prices jump on conflicting reports of a strike on U.S. Navy vessel near Iran

A general view shows the New York Stock Exchange in New York. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)

Wall Street dipped and oil prices jumped early Monday on conflicting reports of a strike by Iran on a U.S. Navy vessel outside of the Strait of Hormuz.

Futures for the S&P 500 were down 0.2 per cent before the opening bell, while futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 0.5 per cent. Nasdaq futures dipped 0.1 per cent.

Oil prices initially jumped five per cent on the news that a U.S. ship had been hit, but is now trading between two per cent and three per cent higher after the U.S. military denied the attack.

The U.S. remains active near the Persian Gulf and U.S. President Donald Trump said the US would guide ships through the Strait of Hormuz, but offered few details.

• S&P 500 market updates here

Iranian news agencies -- including the semiofficial agency Fars and the Iranian Labour News Agency -- claimed that Iran had struck a U.S. Navy vessel southeast of the strait of Hormuz, accusing it of “violating maritime security and navigation norms.”

The price of a barrel of U.S. benchmark crude was up US$2.18 at $104.12 a barrel. Brent crude, the international standard, jumped $3.06 to $111.23 a barrel.

In corporate news, shares of eBay soared as Ryan Cohen’s GameStop pursues an approximately $56 billion takeover of company, seeing it as a vehicle to compete with online retail giant Amazon.

The national gaming retailer said that its approximately 1,600 U.S. stores could become drop-off and shipping locations.

GameStop shares were down 2.6 per cent in premarket trading while eBay shares climbed close to eight per cent. GameStop said that it started accumulating shares in eBay beginning in February and currently has a five per cent stake.

Attention in recent weeks has been split between the impacts of the Middle East conflict and corporate earnings.

Much hinges, analysts say, on progress toward ending the war with Iran and unlocking the shipping bottleneck in the Strait of Hormuz.

The oil market “remains the fulcrum, with hundreds of tankers, bulk carriers, and cargo ships still stranded across the Gulf, idling as storage constraints force producers to shut ... production simply because there is nowhere left to store it,” Stephen Innes of SPI Asset Management said in a commentary.

Thousands of seafarers, many on oil tankers or cargo ships, have been stuck in the Persian Gulf since the war began. Those aboard described to The Associated Press intercepted drones and missiles exploding over the body of water as their vessels run low on drinking water, food and other supplies.

Trump said his “Project Freedom,” an effort to “guide” ships out of the strait, would begin Monday morning in the Middle East. The U.S. Central Command said it would involve guided-missile destroyers, more than 100 aircraft and 15,000 service members, but the Pentagon did not immediately answer questions about how they would be deployed.

• Dow Jones updates here

Offsetting some of the stalemate in Iran are strong corporate earnings. U.S. companies have exceeded expectations for the first three months of the year despite rising inflation, soaring gas prices, and a sense of growing unease among Americans about the war and the U.S. economy

Reporting earnings this week are Palantir, The Walt Disney Co., DoorDash, Uber and McDonald’s.

A trove of labor market data is also scheduled for release this week, including job openings for March, the latest weekly layoffs report. The more comprehensive April jobs report lands on Friday.

In Europe at midday, Germany’s DAX was 0.3 per cent lower, while the CAC 40 in Paris declined one per cent. Markets in Britain were closed for a holiday.

In Asian trading, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng jumped 1.2 per cent to 26,095.88.

Markets in mainland China and Japan were closed for “Golden Week” holidays.

Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 slipped 0.4 per cent to 8,697.10.

Strong buying of tech stocks pushed shares in South Korea sharply higher, as the Kospi gained 5.1 per cent to 6,936.99. Samsung Electronics’ shares surged 5.4%.

In Taiwan, the Taiex leaped 4.6 per cent as shares in computer chipmaker TSMC, the market heavyweight, shot up 6.6 per cent.

Elaine Kurtenbach and Matt Ott, The Associated Press