Oil slides, S&P 500 trims loss to 0.5%

The speed of the crude move, rather than its size, is the signal: a sub-dollar drop compressed into five minutes points to a headline or flow-driven reaction, not a shift in the underlying supply-demand picture. The equity read-through is equally telling — the S&P 500 recovering half its earlier loss suggests energy is currently steering the broader tape, so the two markets are trading as one macro story. Whether that linkage holds, or whether crude's slide and the index's rebound decouple, is the open question.