The Nasdaq Composite surged by 1.5%, gaining 277 points on Monday afternoon, following President Joe Biden’s announcement that he would not run for reelection and his endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris as his successor. Additionally, both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and S&P 500 saw increases of 0.3% and 1.1%, respectively.
In the realm of political predictions, the betting platform Polymarket has indicated Harris is favored to become the Democratic nominee, while PredictIt projects she could be the 47th president of the United States.
Nvidia’s shares rose by 4% after reports surfaced that the company is creating a version of its new Blackwell AI chips specifically for the Chinese market. Nvidia plans to collaborate with local partner Inspur to introduce the chip, tentatively named the “B20,” expected to ship in the second quarter of 2025. Nvidia did not provide further comments on the matter.
Tesla’s stock jumped nearly 5% ahead of its earnings report, during which CEO Elon Musk is anticipated to share details about the future rollout of the company’s robotaxi service. On social media, Musk mentioned that Tesla aims to have working humanoid robots for internal use next year, with the possibility of broader production by 2026.
CrowdStrike, the cybersecurity firm involved in a significant outage last Friday, was still managing the aftermath as operations slowly resumed. The company reported that a substantial number of the approximately 8.5 million affected Windows devices are now back online. Despite these developments, CrowdStrike’s stock dropped over 13%, trading around $263 in the afternoon.
Verizon experienced a decline of nearly 6% following the release of its quarterly earnings report, which revealed that the company fell short of revenue expectations. The downturn is attributed to customers retaining their older phones for longer, negatively affecting upgrade rates, particularly for providers offering new phone promotions. Verizon announced second-quarter revenues of $32.8 billion, slightly under the expected $33.06 billion, with an earnings per share (EPS) of $1.15, meeting forecasts.