US STOCKS-Oil jump lifts Wall St as jobless claims data surges

(For a live blog on the U.S. stock market, click LIVE/ or type
LIVE/ in a news window)
* Energy index rises the most among major S&P sectors
* Initial jobless claims top 6 mln last week
* Dow up 2.24%, S&P 500 up 2.28%, Nasdaq up 1.72%

(Updates to market close)
By Chuck Mikolajczak
April 2 (Reuters) - U.S. stocks rallied on Thursday as hopes
for a truce in the price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia and
a cut in oil output drove gains, taking some sting out of a
shocking jump in Americans filing jobless claims due to
coronavirus-led lockdowns.
The S&P energy index .SPNY , down by more than 50% this
year due to the Russia-Saudi price war and coronavirus-driven
demand worries that has caused oil prices to plunge, climbed
9.08%.
Saudi Arabia has called for an emergency meeting of oil
producers, while U.S. President Donald Trump said he expected
the kingdom and Russia to cut output by as much as 10 million to
15 million barrels a day. That helped U.S. crude CLc1 futures
settle up 24.7%, and Brent up 21.5%, their biggest daily
percentage gains on record. Still, major averages waded into negative territory multiple
times before a late rally pushed stocks higher to close near
session highs.
"It got beaten up so badly, you don't rally like this unless
it was many people thinking this got overdone," said JJ Kinahan,
chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade in Chicago.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average .DJI rose 469.93 points,
or 2.24%, to 21,413.44, the S&P 500 .SPX gained 56.4 points,
or 2.28%, to 2,526.9 and the Nasdaq Composite .IXIC added
126.73 points, or 1.72%, to 7,487.31.
The list of top gainers on the benchmark S&P 500 was
littered with oil companies. Occidental Petroleum OXY.N surged
18.90%, with names such as Apache Corp APA.N and Halliburton
HAL.N also seeing double-digit percentage gains.
A bump in prices may still not be enough to save some of the
debt-laden U.S. shale companies that are on the brink of
bankruptcy as demand continues to plunge due to the coronavirus
pandemic.
Analysts foresee a further decline in U.S. stocks as
country-wide shutdowns to limit the spread of the virus result
in a virtual halt in business activity and force companies to
lay off employees and save cash.
Boeing Co BA.N , once a symbol of America's industrial
might, has offered buyout and early retirement packages to
employees, sending its shares down 5.68%. Investors continue to absorb a wave of bad economic news
that will continue to paint a grim picture. Initial claims for
unemployment benefits last week rose to 6.65 million, exceeding
the top end of economists' estimates at 5.25 million.
"Overall this is a little bit of a victory in and of the
fact that it was such a bad number and the market did kind of
shake it off. It is also the market preparing for a lot more bad
numbers," said Kinahan.
As earnings season slowly begins to get underway, Walgreens
WBA.O fell 6.30% after the drugstore retailer reported a steep
decline in U.S same-store sales in the last week of March.
L4N2BQ32Z
Advancing issues outnumbered declining ones on the NYSE by a
1.61-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 1.34-to-1 ratio favored advancers.
The S&P 500 posted no new 52-week highs and 20 new lows; the
Nasdaq Composite recorded 6 new highs and 132 new lows.
Volume on U.S. exchanges was 12.64 billion shares, compared
with the 15.87 billion average for the full session over the
last 20 trading days.