On Monday afternoon, the Nasdaq surged by 1.5%, gaining 277 points, in response to President Joe Biden’s recent withdrawal from the presidential race and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 saw increases of 0.3% and 1.1%, respectively.
The betting platform Polymarket has named Harris as the Democratic nominee for president, while PredictIt, a New Zealand-based platform, predicts she will become the 47th president of the United States.
In the tech sector, Nvidia’s shares rose by 4% after reports emerged that the company is working on a version of its new Blackwell AI chips specifically for the Chinese market. Nvidia intends to collaborate with local partner Inspur to launch the chip, tentatively named “B20,” which is expected to start shipping in the second quarter of 2025. The company has refrained from commenting on the report.
Tesla’s stock experienced a nearly 5% increase ahead of its earnings report, where CEO Elon Musk is expected to provide an update on the anticipated robotaxi launch. Musk shared on X that the company aims to produce humanoid robots in limited quantities for internal use next year and hopes to achieve mass production for other companies by 2026.
In contrast, CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm linked to a major global tech outage last Friday, continued to deal with the repercussions, although operations were gradually returning to normal. The company reported that many of the approximately 8.5 million affected Windows devices have come back online. However, CrowdStrike’s stock was down over 13% on Monday afternoon, trading around $263.
Additionally, Verizon faced a significant decline of nearly 6% after the release of its quarterly earnings report, which fell short of revenue expectations. The telecommunications company reported second-quarter revenue of $32.8 billion, just below the average analyst estimate of $33.06 billion. Its earnings per share matched expectations at $1.15. The dip in revenue has been attributed to customers retaining their old phones longer, adversely affecting upgrade rates amidst promotional plans for new mobile lines.