Stock Market Today Mid-Morning Updates
On Friday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down by over 100 points. Today, the U.S. government is rolling out a massive study of long Covid to understand the mysterious condition. It will enroll nearly 40,000 patients in a 4-year $1.2 billion study. Former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe was assassinated at a campaign event for the Liberal Democratic Party in the city of Nara, near Kyoto. A suspect was apprehended and is now in custody. There appears to be no clear motive as of right now.
Shares of Occidental Petroleum (NYSE: OXY) are up today after Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway (NYSE: BRK.B) raised its stake in the company to 18.7%. WD-40 (NASDAQ: WDFC) is down today after reporting a quarterly profit that fell short of estimates. Shares of Levi Strauss (NYSE: LEVI) are up today after it reported better-than-expected sales and profit for its latest quarter. The company cites higher prices and strong demand for its products have driven this quarter’s results.
Among the Dow Jones leaders, shares of Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) are down by 0.17% today while Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) is also down by 1.62%. Meanwhile, Disney (NYSE: DIS) and Nike (NYSE: NKE) are trading lower on Friday. Among the Dow financial leaders, Visa (NYSE: V) is down by 0.79% while JPMorgan Chase (NYSE: JPM) is also down by 0.74%
Shares of EV leader Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) are up by 3.31% on Friday. Rival EV companies like Rivian (NASDAQ: RIVN) are up by 2.66%. Lucid Group (NASDAQ: LCID) is trading higher by 3.46% today. Chinese EV leaders like Nio (NYSE: NIO) and Xpeng Motors (NYSE: XPEV) are trading higher as well today.
Dow Jones Today: U.S. Treasury Yields Breaches 3.0% Again on Strong Jobs Report
Following the stock market opening on Friday, the S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq are trading lower at 0.65%, 0.37%, and 0.91%. Among exchange-traded funds, the Nasdaq 100 tracker Invesco QQQ Trust (NASDAQ: QQQ) is down by 0.92% while the SPDR S&P 500 ETF (NYSEARCA: SPY) is also down by 0.63%.
The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury yield breached the 3.0% psychological mark again after strong numbers from June’s jobs report. Diving in, payrolls increased by 372,000 in June, way past the consensus estimates of 250,000. This could indicate that the U.S. economy remains strong despite being plagued by red-hot inflation. Also, it continues to show a strong year for job growth as we move away from the pandemic. The unemployment rate was 3.6%, not changing from May and within estimates. Notably, this quarter’s job growth was led by education and health services, followed by professional and business services.
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Upstart Stock Dives After Company Provides Downward Revision To Revenue Guidance
Among the major firms in today’s stock market news cycle is Upstart (NASDAQ: UPST). For the most part, this is likely thanks to the company’s recent update on the financial end. Getting straight into it, Upstart is reducing its net income and revenue outlook for the current quarter. According to the release, Upstart is currently anticipating revenue of $228 million for the second fiscal quarter. For reference, this would be against its previous estimate of $295 million to $305 million. Additionally, the company is also expecting wider net losses of between $31 million to $27 million. This represents a sizable decrease from its initial projections of a $4 million to a $0 million loss.
Providing some insight into Upstart’s motivations behind this move is CEO Dave Girouard. He explains, “Inflation and recession fears have driven interest rates up and put banks and capital markets on cautious footing.” Girouard adds, “Our revenue was negatively impacted by two factors approximately equally. First, our marketplace is funding constrained, largely driven by concerns about the macroeconomy among lenders and capital market participants. Second, in Q2, we took action to convert loans on our balance sheet into cash, which, given the quickly increasing rate environment, negatively impacted our revenue.” All in all, it seems that current macro-environments are weighing in on Upstart’s operations.
Even so, CFO Sanjay Datta does say that Upstart loans “have performed exceptionally well.” He also highlights that this is apparent from its on-platform loans posting commendable average returns since 2018. With all this in mind, investors could be considering UPST stock even with its losses of over 20% today.
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Twitter Stock Dips Following Mentions Of Elon Musk Possibly Reconsidering Acquisition
Twitter (NYSE: TWTR) is also in the news today following a head-turning report by the Washington Post (WP). In essence, the WP reports that Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla is re-thinking his $44 billion purchase of Twitter. The exact words from the WP’s end are “serious jeopardy” in this case. Accordingly, Twitter’s handling of bot and spam accounts on its platforms appears to be a possible reason for this. In fact, this would be a topic that both parties have had disagreements on in the past as well. Seeing as the presence of bot accounts would influence some of Twitter’s key metrics like active user count, Musk’s past responses are not unwarranted.
Also, the WP report adds that Musk and his team have discontinued active discussions with a potential backer for the deal. In the larger scheme of things, this twist marks yet another development in the complex dealings between Twitter and Musk. As a result, the report also suggests that Musk could resort to relying on a “potentially drastic action.” Regarding its issue with bots on the platform, Twitter does not seem to be sitting idly by as well. Just yesterday, the company revealed its strategy for dealing with automated accounts. Through the media briefing, Twitter explains that it relies on a mix of human reviews and internal data to determine the number of bot accounts. As of yesterday, the company states that these accounts make up less than 5% of the total users on the Twitter platform.
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