Wild trading: Stock futures point lower after fierce Wall Street comeback

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Financial markets went on a roller-coaster ride on Thursday as traders monitored the latest happenings in Ukraine, where Russia used land, air and naval forces for an invasion that has shocked the world. WTI crude oil surged to more than $100 a barrel for the first time since 2014, before dropping back to trade near the $90 level. The Nasdaq Composite even briefly went into a bear market, before turning a 3.5% intraday loss into a gain of 3.3%. Stock index futures are on the backfoot again this morning, with Dow, S&P 500 and Nasdaq all off by 0.8% in early morning action.

"Buy the dip": Many players have touted this market maxim since the COVID pandemic, when a steep selloff was followed by an unprecedented amount of buying that sent indices to continuous record highs. Since then, investors have been on the hunt for bargains, or so-called oversold conditions, while algo trading has magnified the sentiment and contributed to big reversals. Wells Fargo's Paul Christopher is warning that there is still "too much uncertainty" out there, but a question-and-answer session at President Biden's press conference helped calm some nerves.

"First of all, there's no doubt that when a major nuclear power attacks and invades another country that the world is going to respond and markets are going to respond all over the world," Biden said from the White House. "The notion that this is going to last for a long time is highly unlikely, as long as we continue to stay resolved in imposing the sanctions we're going to impose on Russia. We have purposely designed these sanctions to maximize a long-term impact on Russia and to minimize the impact on the United States and our allies."

Outlook: Western intelligence officials say Kyiv could fall to Russian forces in the coming hours. Ukraine's air defenses have been mostly eliminated and the Russian military controls several airfields that it could use to transport more troops into the country. The end-game for Vladimir Putin would be to install a puppet regime in Kyiv, though Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has promised to defend his nation, saying that he and his government will remain in the capital.