Oil is up and stocks are down and Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing starts now.

Welcome to Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing. I'm Travis Hoym. joined today by Lou Whiteman and Rachel Warren.

Guys, we got to start with the topic of the day, which is the market is down.

Oil is up about 5% as we're recording early on

Wednesday. So Rachel, this does seem to be a bit of a trend, at least over the past couple of

weeks. Nasdaq is down about 5%. The NASDAQ 100. We're starting to see a little bit of a

pullback there. Maybe that's valuation base. Maybe that's a little bit of, you know, we're waiting for earning season to begin. But now we have this oil thing going on. So what are the headlines that people need to keep in mind as they're looking at their investments today? Yeah, I mean, there's a few factors at play. Obviously, oil and inflation are two big ones. You know, the U.S. just canceled its sanctions waiver on Iranian oil. The ceasefire has been declared over. That basically means less oil is likely to be moving around the world. We've seen Brent crude prices go up. You know, tech stocks are obviously taking a big hit because U.S. inflation is already quite warm at 4.2%.

The worry about some of these spikes is that the Fed will keep interest rates higher for longer.

And when interest rates stay high, investors are less willing that they might be in other periods

to pay those premium prices for the tech companies that move the market and that promise huge

profits down the road. You could look at the chip sector this week, right market and that, you know, promise huge profits down the road.

I mean, you could look at the chip sector this week, right? You know, had Samsung reported a massive

19-fold jump in profits with a huge AI demand, but the stock still fell. I think a lot of what we

see is this kind of Wall Street being trapped in a short-term 90-day game. A lot of the daily

market volume is driven by quantitative computer algorithms. And when scary headlines hit the tape,

those models often trigger those cell orders. So I think that's also something we're seeing

at play right now. Lou, computers have been really running the market for quite a while, but it does

seem, yeah, it does seem like we're in a period where the reactions, oil is something we talked about like six months ago.

And it hasn't turned out to be a huge deal. Is this a huge deal? Or is this just kind of the day-to-day volatility that we always see in the market?

So oil has spiked levels that are still below June 24th prices, just to give some, you know, perspective here.

A lot of this is headline writing and a lot of this is ignore the noise.

I mean, I don't think we should overread in anything. Like, you know, with all

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