By Yasin Ebrahim

Investing.com — The S&P 500 rallied Thursday, led by energy as investors mulled the Federal Reserve’s plan to hike rates several times this year, and the reports suggesting that a solution to ending the Ukraine-Russia war is still some ways off.

They rose 1.2% and gained 1.3%.

The energy stocks rose more than 3% after oil prices recovered some of their losses and traded above $100 per barrel. This was following Russia’s downplayed efforts to reach peace with Ukraine.

The Kremlin reportedly said that news pointing to progress in Ukraine-Russia peace talks was “wrong,” prompting investors to resume bets for a prolonged war that could disrupt energy supplies and keep oil prices rising.

In addition to the expectation of a supply shortage, the International Energy Agency has stated that 3,000,000 barrels per Day (and more) Russian oil products and oils could be shut down starting in April.

Occidental Petroleum (NYSE:), Devon Energy (NYSE:), APA (NASDAQ;) saw an increase of more than 9% (9%), 7% (7%), respectively

Occidental Petroleum was also boosted by news that Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE:) purchased 18.1 million more shares of Occidental.

In the lifting up of the wider market was consumer discretionary as well, driven higher by Etsy and Garmin (NYSE) and Dollar General(NYSE).

Dollar General rose more than 4 percent after the company increased its quarterly dividend 31%. This was following fourth quarter results that were disappointing on the bottom and top lines.

Pagerduty Inc After reporting higher-than-expected quarterly results and new product launches, (NYSE:) rose more than 20%

Bank stocks, meanwhile, which delivered swashbuckling gains on Wednesday, failed to keep up momentum as the further flattening in the yield curve – when short term rates increase faster than longer term rates – added to worries about the Federal Reserve causing a recession by slowing the economy down too much.

Fifth Third Bancorp (NASDAQ) and Regions Financial, (NYSE), were both down over 1%. Truist Financial (NYSE), Truist Financial(NYSE:) also fell.

“We would expect some type of inversion of the yield curve, which is definitely going to get the recession word thrown around much more given that it’s going to skew growth to the downside,” David Wagner, portfolio manager at Aptus Capital Advisors told Investing.com in an interview on Thursday.

Tech was, however, the relative underperformer for the day. The big tech market traded mostly positive led by Amazon (NASDAQ :), while weakness in Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (NASDAQ 🙂 and Microsoft Corporation were weighed.