On Monday afternoon, the Nasdaq climbed 1.5%, gaining 277 points, following President Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. During the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average increased by 0.3% and the S&P 500 rose by 1.1%.
The betting platform Polymarket is backing Harris as the Democratic nominee for president, while PredictIt, based in New Zealand, forecasts her as the likely 47th president of the United States.
In a separate development, Nvidia’s shares rose 4% after news emerged that the company is working on a version of its Blackwell AI chips for the Chinese market. Nvidia is expected to partner with local distributor Inspur to launch and sell the chip, tentatively named the “B20,” with shipments slated to begin in the second quarter of 2025. Nvidia has not commented on this development.
Tesla’s stock experienced a nearly 5% increase ahead of its anticipated earnings report, during which CEO Elon Musk is expected to discuss the delays regarding the company’s robotaxi rollout. Musk indicated that Tesla plans to produce “genuinely useful humanoid robots” for internal use next year, with hopes for higher production for external companies by 2026.
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm responsible for the recent global tech outage, reported that it is beginning to resolve the effects of the incident. Approximately 8.5 million affected Windows devices are gradually coming back online. However, CrowdStrike’s stock dropped over 13% on Monday afternoon, trading around $263.
Meanwhile, Verizon faced a nearly 6% decline after its quarterly earnings report revealed that it fell short of revenue expectations. The company’s revenue for the second quarter was $32.8 billion, just below the analysts’ average estimate of $33.06 billion, while earnings per share were reported at $1.15, meeting expectations. This decline has been attributed to customers retaining their old phones for longer periods, impacting upgrade rates linked to promotional mobile phone plans.