On Monday afternoon, the Nasdaq Composite Index rose by 1.5%, gaining 277 points, following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would withdraw from the presidential race and endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 also saw slight increases, adding 0.3% and 1.1% respectively.
The crypto betting platform Polymarket has endorsed Harris as the Democratic nominee for president, while PredictIt from New Zealand forecasts that she will become the 47th president of the United States.
In notable stock movements, Nvidia shares climbed 4% after a report from Reuters indicated that the company is developing a version of its new Blackwell AI chips tailored for the Chinese market. Nvidia plans to collaborate with a local partner, Inspur, to launch the chip, which is tentatively named the “B20,” with expected shipping to start in the second quarter of 2025. Nvidia has not commented on the report.
Tesla’s stock increased nearly 5% ahead of its upcoming earnings report, where CEO Elon Musk is anticipated to discuss the delayed launch of the company’s robotaxi. Musk mentioned on social media that Tesla aims to have functional humanoid robots in low production for internal use by next year, with hopes for broader production for other companies by 2026.
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm implicated in last Friday’s significant global tech outage, faced continued challenges, although the situation was gradually improving. The company reported that a substantial portion of the estimated 8.5 million affected Windows devices is now back online. Nevertheless, CrowdStrike’s stock dropped over 13% on Monday afternoon, trading around $263.
Verizon experienced a nearly 6% drop in its stock price following the announcement of its quarterly earnings report. The telecom giant fell short of revenue expectations as customers are holding on to their old phones longer, negatively affecting upgrade rates for providers offering new phone plans. Verizon reported second-quarter revenues of $32.8 billion, below the analysts’ average expectation of $33.06 billion, and earnings per share were reported at $1.15, meeting forecasts.