Mid-Afternoon Market Update: Crude Oil Down 1.3%; Provention Bio Shares Spike Higher

Toward the end of trading Monday, the Dow traded up 0.49 percent to 26112 while the NASDAQ rose 1.26 percent to 7,840. The S&P also rose, gaining 0.66 percent to 2,892.

Leading and Lagging Sectors

Financial shares rose 1.3 percent on Monday. Meanwhile, top gainers in the sector included 360 Finance, Inc. QFIN, up 8 percent, and Watford Holdings Ltd. WTRE, up 8 percent.

In trading on Monday, utilities shares fell by 0.7 percent.

Top Headline

Salesforce.com, inc. CRM is buying Tableau Software Inc DATA for about $15.7 billion. Each share of Tableau class A, B stock will be exchanged for $1.103 shares of Salesforce’s common stock.

Tableau Software is an interactive data visualization software company and Salesforce is a cloud-based software company headquartered in San Francisco.

Equities Trading UP

Provention Bio, Inc. PRVB shares shot up 197 percent to $12.93 following publication of the results of a National Institutes of Health, or NIH,-sponsored study online in the New England Journal of Medicine as well as presentation of the same at the 79th Annual American Diabetes Association Meeting. Provention Bio said the "At-Risk" study that evaluated its PRV-031, an anti-CD3 monoclonal antibody, for the prevention or delay of clinical Type 1 diabetes, or TID, in relatives who are at high-risk of developing the disease showed that a single 14-day course of the investigational asset significantly delayed the onset and diagnosis of clinical T1D by a median of two years in children, compared to placebo.

Shares of Vuzix Corporation VUZI got a boost, shooting up 48 percent to $3.01. Vuzix and NNTC announced fully autonomous AI-Powered face recognition system integrated on smart glasses.

NovaBay Pharmaceuticals, Inc. NBY shares were also up, gaining 891 percent to $3.15 after the company inked an agreement to sell its eye care product on Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN. NovaBay's eye care product called Avenova is designed for removal of microorganisms and debris which typically leads to meibomian gland dysfunction, dry eye and blepharitis. The company said Monday Avenova will start selling on Amazon at a price of $29.99 and without a prescription.

Equities Trading DOWN

INSYS Therapeutics, Inc. INSY shares tumbled 53 percent to $0.6189 following news the company initiated a court supervised process to facilitate asset sales via Chapter 11 bankruptcy. The company previously warned about a potential bankruptcy on May 10.

Shares of ReWalk Robotics Ltd. RWLK were down 21 percent to $5.42 after the company announced a direct offering of 833,000 shares at $6.60 per share for $5 million in gross proceeds.

Concrete Pumping Holdings, Inc. BBCP was down, falling 12 percent to $4.32 after the company reported a Q2 net loss of $0.35 per share, versus net income of $0.39 per share. Its revenue rose 10 percent to $62.0 million.

Commodities

In commodity news, oil traded down 1.3 percent to $53.28, while gold traded down 1.1 percent to $1,331.30.

Silver traded down 2.4 percent Monday to $14.67, while copper rose 1.4 percent to $2.663.

Euro zone

European shares closed higher today. The eurozone’s STOXX 600 rose 0.21 percent, the Spanish Ibex Index rose 0.63 percent, while Italy’s FTSE MIB Index rose 0.61 percent. Meanwhile, the German DAX climbed 0.77 percent, and the French CAC 40 rose 0.34 percent while UK shares rose 0.59 percent.

Economics

On the economics calendar Monday, there is no important data due out.