Stocks shake tech woes; yields climb

U.S. stocks edged higher, led by energy-related companies, as equity markets shrugged off weakness in technology and threats of global trade barriers. Government bond yields increased as investors braced for higher U.S. borrowing rates.

Crude advanced to a three-week high as the OPEC-led alliance of major oil producers accelerated the timeline for curbing a worldwide supply glut, helping to lift the shares of companies such as Hess and Marathon Petroleum. Facebook’s mounting Cambridge Analytica data crisis continued to weigh on tech and draw the ire of politicians on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Things have certainly gotten more volatile,” said Gary Bradshaw, a portfolio manager at Hodges Capital Management in Dallas. “The Fed, that’s going to be the news tomorrow. Everybody is expecting a rate increase, and then of course the big sell-off in tech.”

Investors are struggling to rediscover their bullishness in the wake of this week’s tech setbacks and with the Federal Reserve rate decision a day away.

Finance ministers from the world’s largest economies struggled to block President Donald Trump’s push to erect trade barriers that many warned threaten to undermine the broadest global expansion since 2010. Policymakers from the Group of 20 finished talks in Buenos Aires on Tuesday with little to show for their efforts to convince the U.S. to pare back protectionist steps, including new metal tariffs.

Investigators raid BMW offices

Prosecutors in Munich searched BMW’s headquarters Tuesday as part of their continuing investigation into an emissions-cheating scandal that has badly damaged other German carmakers. The raids, in which about 100 investigators targeted BMW offices in Munich and an engine factory in Austria, suggested that all of Germany’s top domestic automakers may have evaded emissions rules. Munich prosecutors said in a statement they were investigating whether the software in some BMW diesel models functioned like defeat devices, cranking up pollution controls when a car’s engine computer detects an emissions test in progress and allowing excess exhaust under real-world conditions. BMW said the software had been installed by mistake.

None of the vehicle models at issue is in the United States, BMW said. BMW said it would recall about 11,400 cars containing the software to fix the problem, a minuscule number considering that Volkswagen has admitted to installing emissions-cheating software in 11 million vehicles around the world.