Kai Risdahl

The Nasdaq grew 2 and 4 tenths percent, S&P 500 up 1.4 percent.

More about the oil futures market in a second.

Oil traders today, though, optimistic about progress on an R&P steel.

Brent crude hovered around $92 a barrel, had been up to about $114, if you remember.

Stock market once again boosted by technology.

After the bell yesterday, Dell reported its first quarter revenue was up 88% at $43 billion.

Where'd all that money come from?

Well, AI, of course.

Dell Technologies surged 32.75% today.

Bonds up, yield on the 10-year T-note down just a little bit, 4.43%.

You're listening to Marketplace.

This is Marketplace.

I'm Kai Risdahl.

Every now and then on this program, we do a story on the bond market, specifically a story about what's known as the yield curve, comparing the yields, the interest rates, for short, medium, and long-term government bonds.

We do those stories because the yield curve can tell us some things about what investors think is going to happen across each of those short, medium, and long-term timeframes.

There are, it turns out, similar conclusions to be drawn from the oil futures market, which are basically bets on what the price of oil is going to be at the end of, could be next month, next year, even a decade from now.

Marketplace's Justin Ho looked at what oil futures are telling us then about where oil prices and energy markets overall might be headed.

Back in the heyday of the pandemic economy, we were doing a whole lot of stories about travel nurses, RNs moving from hospital to hospital to help fill gaps in workforce demand.

According to a staffing industry analyst's report, travel nurse revenue peaked in 2022, $45 billion almost.

Since then, the market has shrunk a bit, but as more health care workers are aging out of that slice of the labor force, there are still thousands of travel nurses roving around the country on those short-term contracts.