Major indicies are recovering from their morning lows and exhibiting good resilience to selling interest. In addition, investors await the FOMC minutes at 2 PM EST.

Meanwhile, the ten-year treasury yield (TNX) is seeing little change.

Four sectors are heading higher. Energy (XLE) is once again leading, with Occidental Petroleum (OXY) and Devon Energy (DVN) as the winning standouts in the sector and contributing to the outperformance. Materials (XLB) is the worst performer after Celanese (CE) reported earnings and expects demand weakness to continue into the next quarter.

Quantum stocks are higher this afternoon, after Microsoft (MSFT) unveiled the Majorana 1, the world’s first quantum processor powered by 8 topological qubits. After additional iterations this technology can potentially fit millions of qubits onto a single chip and uses a Majorana fermion configuration, akin to that theoretical physicist Ettore Majorana described in 1937.