Stocks Are Flying Higher

Stocks are surging.

In early afternoon trade on Thursday, the Dow was up 200 points, the S&P 500 was up 27 points, and the Nasdaq was up 68 points.

All of the major averages were up better than 1.1%, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq leading gains with 1.4%.

Bonds will also weakening a bit on Thursday, with the 10-year rising back to 2.2% after dropping as low as 2.16% on Wednesday.

The bounceback in stocks follows losses on Wednesday as each of the US stock indexes lost more than 1.5%.

On Thursday, oil was still falling, with WTI crude trading below $61 a barrel and touching as low as $60.09 at one point.

In afternoon trade on Thursday, oil was still volatile and trading below $61 but off of its worst levels of the day.

Markets around the world were still volatile, with stocks in Greece selling off on Thursday and markets in Dubai crashing overnight.

Thursday's stocks gains follow two bits of positive economic news this morning, as November retail sales and initial jobless claims data came in better than expected.

Retail sales grew 0.7% month-on-month in November better than the 0.4% that was expected, while initial jobless claims fell to 294,000 last week.