Meta leads tech rally as oil prices fall

September 21, 2026 adminsr

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US tech stocks surged on Monday as oil prices fell back towards $100 a barrel and investors bet that this week’s UN General Assembly in New York might bring diplomatic progress in the Middle East conflict and ease inflationary pressures.

The Nasdaq Composite jumped 2.3 per cent to set a record closing high and the S&P 500 rose 1.5 per cent for its biggest one-day gain since early August.

The gains came as Brent crude, the global oil benchmark, fell as much as 4 per cent to $99.02 a barrel, its lowest level since September 9. Brent later settled 3.4 per cent lower at $100.34.

Meta closed 11.4 per cent higher after its Muse AI personal assistant became the most downloaded free app on Apple’s App Store, taking its gains to about 35 per cent over the past month. The share gains on Monday added $192.3bn in market capitalisation, its third-biggest one-day increase on record.

The Muse “agent”, which Meta says can help users with everything from ordering groceries to planning their social life, is critical to Mark Zuckerberg’s AI strategy.

“Meta is being repriced as an AI leader,” said Mike O’Rourke, chief market strategist at brokerage Jones Trading. “The losers here would be Anthropic and OpenAI.”

Chip stocks linked to the AI trade also rose. Intel added 12.1 per cent while AMD rose 9.9 per cent to surpass $1tn in market value. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, which tracks the major US chip companies, rose 4.3 per cent as the tech sector broadly benefited from lower inflation expectations.

Progress on talks with Iran could ease energy price pressure. Overnight, Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, said on X that the “door is open for Iran back to the negotiating table if they do so in good faith”.

West Texas Intermediate, the US benchmark, settled 4.5 per cent lower to below $96 a barrel on Monday.

On Sunday, a Fox News reporter said US President Donald Trump had told him he would “probably be open” to meeting Iran’s President Masoud Pezeshkian on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, where the main business gets under way on Tuesday.

The US “saying that negotiations remain on the table explains the drop [in oil]”, said Van Luu, global head of solutions strategy at Russell Investments.

The fall was nevertheless striking, given that Iran-backed Houthis had escalated their attacks on Saudi Arabia, a US ally in the region, over the weekend, he added.

The 10-year US Treasury yield fell 0.04 percentage points to 4.96 per cent, having last week hit 5 per cent for the first time since 2023. Yields fall when prices rise.

European government bonds, which were battered last week by high energy prices and fiscal concerns in France, regained ground, with France’s 10-year yield down 0.1 percentage points to 4.47 per cent.

Italy’s 10-year yield fell 0.1 percentage points to 4.34 per cent, while UK 10-year yields were 0.08 percentage points lower at 5.22 per cent.

European stock markets also recouped much of their losses from Friday’s session. The benchmark Stoxx Europe 600 index rose 1 per cent, while the UK’s FTSE 100 was up 0.8 per cent and France’s Cac gained 0.9 per cent.

In a sign of the pressure from rising energy prices on the US government, Trump pressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy on a Sunday call to stop striking Russian refineries over concerns that the attacks were worsening a global diesel shortage.

“Our view remains that we are past the local peak in tensions [in the Middle East] and we should see some move towards normalisation in the coming weeks,” said Mohit Kumar at Jefferies.

“Our theory remains that the first couple of weeks of October could be a sweet spot for some sort of fudge between the US and Iran,” he added.