Nasdaq climbed 1.5%, adding 277 points by Monday afternoon, following President Joe Biden’s exit from the presidential race on Sunday and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. The Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 also experienced gains, increasing by 0.3% and 1.1%, respectively.
The betting platform Polymarket is backing Harris as the Democratic nominee, while PredictIt, based in New Zealand, forecasts she will become the 47th president of the United States.
Nvidia’s shares rose 4% after reports indicated the company is creating a version of its new Blackwell AI chips tailored for the Chinese market. Collaborating with local distributor Inspur, Nvidia plans to launch the chip, tentatively named “B20,” with shipments expected to commence in the second quarter of 2025. Nvidia has not commented on these developments.
Tesla’s stock experienced a nearly 5% increase ahead of its earnings report, during which CEO Elon Musk is anticipated to update investors on the delayed unveiling of the company’s robotaxi. Musk mentioned on X that Tesla would produce useful humanoid robots for internal use in low volumes next year, and hopes to achieve higher production for other companies by 2026.
Meanwhile, CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm involved in a major global tech outage, continues to recover, with many of the approximately 8.5 million affected Windows devices coming back online. Despite this, its stock fell over 13% to around $263 in afternoon trading on Monday.
Verizon’s stock dropped nearly 6% following its quarterly earnings report, which revealed the company missed revenue expectations. This shortfall is attributed to customers keeping their old phones longer, negatively affecting upgrade rates. Verizon reported second-quarter revenue of $32.8 billion, slightly below the $33.06 billion forecast by analysts, while earnings per share were in line with expectations at $1.15.