Welcome to Closing Bell. I'm John Ford in for Scott Wapner. And we are live from Post 9 at the New York Stock Exchange.

This make or break hour starts with a bouncing stock says oil pulls back from 100 bucks a barrel.

Here's the scorecard with 60 minutes to go in the trading day.

Tech is leading the way. You can see the NASDAQ is up about 1.4%.

The Dow is higher by more than 400 points and the SDAQ is up about 1.4%. The Dow is higher by more than 400 points, and the S&P is up a percent.

The Russell doing quite well also hanging in there with the NASDAQ up more than 1.3.

Now as Nvidia's annual AI conference gets underway in California, we're also going to have

a live report on that coming up.

Also, all of the Mag 7 stocks, not just Invidia, are in the green.

You can see meta there up better than 2% close to 2.5.

Meantime, staples, materials, energy are the worst performing sectors.

All of this comes, we continue to follow the latest developments out of the Middle

East. And for that, let's get straight to our Amen Javvers live in Washington with more. Amen.

John, we heard from the President of the United States at the White House earlier today. This was at

an unrelated event that was scheduled for a meeting of the board of directors of the Kennedy Center.

The president's been very involved in the decorations and the artists and the board membership

there. He brought the press in to that meeting and gave them a sense of where he thinks

things are in terms of the war in Iran. Here's what he said in terms of the Strait of Hormuz.

And we don't have the soundbite. What the president did say, John, I'm just going to read you the transcript. He said, we're hammering their capacity to threaten commercial shipping in the

Strait of Hormuz with more than 30 mine laying ships destroyed.

He said, we hit to the best of our knowledge all of their mind laying ships,

and now they can put them on other types of ships we don't know, and we don't know of any that have been dropped in.

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