After a couple of sluggish days, including a historically bad day last Thursday, the stock market looks poised to rally. Retail sales were up 17.7% in May after a record drop off in April. This latest surge can be attested to many of the nation’s stores and restaurants being allowed to open up in the wake of Covid-19. Economists were expecting a bounce back, but not to this scale. Many polled predicted the jump would be somewhere around 8-9% but that number was blown out of the water. The market is surprisingly positively with Dow Jones Futures already up 900 points at the time of this writing.

However, while the stock market looks good, the oil market is still struggling with the fallout from Covid-19 and the struggle is expected to continue. While demand for oil is slowly starting to creep back, experts don’t expect the market to fully recover until 2022. In the meantime, we’ll take little victories where we can get them, like today as WTI rose 3.8% to $38.54 per barrel. Even with that rise, the IEA still predicts we will see a demand decline to the tune of 8-million barrels per day. Which would account for the largest drop on record, but still not as severe as originally predicted. It looks like things may finally be looking up a bit. Little victories.