Stock market today: Live updates

Nvidia topped Alphabet in market value during Wednesday’s session after surpassing Amazon in market capitalization earlier in the week.

The chipmaking stock was last up less than 1% and trading at a market cap of more than $1.83 trillion. Alphabet last traded a nudge lower at a market cap of $1.8 trillion.

This move pushes Nvidia to the third largest market cap in the S&P 500 behind Microsoft and Apple.

— Samantha Subin

Shares of Lyft headed for their best day in the rideshare provider’s nearly half-decade on the public market as investors digested the latest earnings report.

Lyft shares climbed more than 31% in midday trading on Wednesday, putting the stock on pace to see its best day since it began trading in March 2019. The stock’s next best day on record is March 19, 2020, when it added 29%.

Wednesday’s rally comes a day after the rideshare company posted earnings per share that beat expectations for the fourth quarter, while revenue came in line with Wall Street forecasts. But leadership had to correct a major error in margin expansion numbers during the company’s earnings call.

— Alex Harring

An expected first half rise in stock market volatility has begun and and “history suggests at least a 5% SPX slide,” Wells Fargo equity strategist Christopher Harvey write in a note Wednesday, referring to the S&P 500. Tuesday’s “market action might be the start of the selloff we have been expecting,” Harvey said.

Momentum and trend following strategies that emphasize buying strong stocks and selling weaker ones have worked well lately, Wells Fargo said. “Price momentum remains one of the best-performing factors in recent months,” with a 12-month momentum screen of the Russell 1000 stocks returning 5% in January, Harvey said. “Passive trends have helped trend-following strategies: As money shifts into passive, more portfolio money is dedicated to names that are ‘working’ vs. names that are not, supporting trend-following techniques.”

As a result, Harvey recommended overweighting communications services, health care and utility stocks and underweighting energy and industrial companies, and software over computer hardware names.

“GDP strength supports Fed Funds re-pricing,” Harvey said, acknowledging the recent move higher in Treasury yields is warranted by the vigorous economy.

— Scott Schnipper

While some well-known seasonality patterns exist within the equity market, Citi has revealed that there may not always be a clear reason to back these trends.

“While anecdotal evidence exists for monthly return patterns in equities, statistical evidence is at best patchy,” wrote analyst Chris Montagu. “We find that while on average there are distinct monthly return patterns, in many cases statistical significance is absent as well as economic rationale as to why they exist.”

Montagu added that amongst the market seasonality patterns, the trends with respect to style factors have been less studied by investors.

— Lisa Kailai Han

Deutsche Bank sees several events on the horizon that could give shares of General Electric, its top large-cap stock, a boost. One is the company’s investor days on March 6-7, another is the April spinoff of GE Vernova — and announcements tied to this event. Analyst Scott Deuschle also expects GE has set itself up for a strong first-quarter earnings beat.

Over the past year, GE shares have risen nearly 72%. Deuschle has a $185 price target for GE, which is about 28% higher than its Tuesday close.

“Since the beginning of 2023, GE’s share price performance has correlated more with Microsoft … than it has with Aerospace stocks … , the XLI … , or the S&P 500 …,” Deuschle said.

—Christina Cheddar Berk

Stocks rose on Wednesday, clawing back some of their steep Tuesday losses that saw the Dow Jones Industrial Average cinching its worst day since March 2023.

The 30-stock index rose 116 points, or 0.3%. The S&P 500 added 0.6%, while the Nasdaq Composite gained 0.9%.

— Lisa Kailai Han

Chicago Federal Reserve President Austan Goolsbee said longer-term inflation indicators still look positive even after the consumer price index in January came in stronger than expected.

In remarks to be delivered Wednesday morning, the central bank official said core inflation, which strips out food and energy, has been running at or below the Fed’s 2% annual target as measured by personal consumption expenditures prices, according to notes released ahead of the 9:30 a.m. ET speech.

However, core CPI, a slightly different measure, held at 3.9% in January, boosted largely by higher than expected shelter costs.

Goolsbee, a nonvoting member of the rate-setting Federal Open Market Committee, noted the stronger housing reading but said alternative measures have told a different story, and he pointed out that goods inflation has continued to recede.

—Jeff Cox

Gold and silver hit prices last seen in 2023 early Wednesday.

Gold touched 1998.2, its lowest since it reached 1,987.9 on Dec. 13. Silver fell as low as 21.975, a price last seen on Nov. 13, when it traded at 21.925.

— Alex Harring, Gina Francolla

Check out the companies making headlines before the bell:

• Lyft — Shares surged 21% after the ride-hailing company posted stronger-than-expected fourth-quarter results and issued better-than-expected guidance. In its most recent quarter, Lyft posted adjusted earnings of 18 cents per share, more than the LSEG consensus estimate of 8 cents per-share earnings. Revenue of $1.22 billion was in line with analysts’ expectations. However, Lyft shares were off their Tuesday post-market high as the company corrected an overstatement of its margin forecast contained in its initial press release.
• Robinhood Markets — Shares of Robinhood soared roughly 16.5% after the investing platform beat on earnings and revenue for the fourth quarter. Robinhood reported a profit of 3 cents per share on $471 million in revenue, while analysts polled by LSEG forecasted a loss of 1 cent per share on $457 million in revenue.
• Angi — Shares jumped 7% after the home services platform reported a narrower-than-expected quarterly loss. Angi posted a fourth-quarter loss of 1 cent per share, smaller than the loss of 2 cents per share expected by analysts polled by FactSet. On the other hand, revenue of $300.4 million came in below the FactSet consensus estimate of $309.9 million.

Read the full list here.

— Sarah Min

Between $400 billion to $600 billion worth of cash that has built up on household and corporate balance sheets is set to move back into risk assets in the near future, according to Barclays.

Analyst Joseph Abate pointed out that cash has piled up since early 2020, with cash holdings sitting at three standard deviations higher than their long-term average. Abate added that most of this liquidity belongs to households and sits in checking deposit accounts.

“We think there are two potential catalysts that could prompt cash to move: 1) lower cash returns , and 2) a decline in risk aversion,” Abate wrote. “Retail fund flow patterns post-GFC suggest that cash coming in from the sidelines is likely to favor credit over equities.”

— Lisa Kailai Han

Amazon founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos sold roughly $2.08 billion of shares in the e-commerce company over the past few days, according to a filing.

The sales of 11,997,698 Amazon shares began Friday and continued Monday, the filing showed. The sales were executed under a prearranged trading plan that Bezos adopted in November. As part of the plan, Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021, plans to sell 50 million Amazon shares before Jan. 31, 2025.

— Yun Li, Annie Palmer

Lyft shares soared after the company’s fourth-quarter report was released, but they later pared those gains after management flagged the report included a critical error.

CFO Erin Brewer told analysts that Lyft misstated its margin expansion in the release. Instead of 500 basis points (5%) of growth for the year, Lyft sees an increase of 50 basis points (0.5%).

The stock gave up some of its initial gains but was still up more than 20% in the premarket Wednesday on the back of strong fourth-quarter earnings.

— Fred Imbert, Ari Levy

Bitcoin surged more than 4% to its highest level in two years on Wednesday, pushing its market cap back over $1 trillion as growing success of U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs turned investor sentiment more positive.

The flagship cryptocurrency was last higher by about 4% at $51,544.00, according to Coin Metrics. Earlier in the morning it rose to $51,803.00. Ether also rose about 4% to $2,748.53.

The surge pulled crypto-related equities higher in premarket trading. Trading platform Coinbase and bitcoin proxy Microstrategy gained 7% each. Miners Iris Energy and CleanSpark rose 17% and 14%, respectively, while Marathon Digital advanced 12% and Riot Platforms added 9%.

— Tanaya Macheel

Markets are taking a breather following Tuesday’s post-CPI sell-off, as investors reassess inflation expectations going forward, Adam Crisafulli of Vital Knowledge wrote to clients.

“Markets are rebounding sharply so far this morning following the CPI-induced shellacking on Tuesday,” he wrote. “There’s a bit of a reassessment taking place on inflation after the (brief but intense) panic yesterday thanks to downside price readings this morning out of the UK and India, along with a slew of disinflationary trends throughout earnings reports.”

“While the US CPI was undoubtably disappointing, it’s hardly a market-killing number (that’s not to say though that parts of the market, especially tech, were overbought and in need of a consolidation period),” he added.

— Fred Imbert

European shares made a muted start to Wednesday’s trade.

The pan-European Stoxx 600 index inched 0.1% higher in early trade, with retail stocks adding 0.5% while mining stocks slipped 0.7% lower.

Britain’s FTSE 100 was the top performer, adding 0.6% while most major European bourses hovered around the flatline.

– Elliot Smith

U.K. inflation held steady at 4% year-on-year in January on the back of easing prices for furniture and household goods, food and non-alcoholic beverages.

Month-on-month, the headline consumer price index fell to -0.6%, returning to negative territory after December’s surprise increase by 0.4% on the month and 4% annually.

Economists polled by Reuters had produced a consensus forecast of 4.2% year-on-year for January and -0.3% for the month.

“The largest upward contribution to the monthly change in both CPIH and CPI annual rates came from housing and household services (principally higher gas and electricity charges), while the largest downward contribution came from furniture and household goods, and food and non-alcoholic beverages,” the Office for National Statistics said Wednesday.

Read the full story here

– Elliot Smith

Artificial intelligence will be more than just a passing fad, but that doesn’t mean now is a good time to buy the stocks tied to the trend, according to GMO co-founder Jeremy Grantham.

“My guess is we are getting wildly enthusiastic about AI. It is an incredibly important development, like the internet was, and probably more so. … But it will need a digestive phase. We are, I think, way over our skis,” Grantham said at the Exchange ETF conference on Tuesday.

The fund manager, who has built his multidecade career around identifying quality stocks and avoiding speculative booms, compared AI to the tech bubble around 2000 and the bubble in railroad stocks more than a century ago.

— Jesse Pound

European earnings have seen a robust season, and signs point to this strength staying, according to Bernstein.

“European forward earnings are currently 14% above their long-run trend, and 30% higher than pre-Covid at the market level, which makes for an uneasy visual,” the investment firm wrote. “Is there a risk of a significant cut to estimates and earnings return to long-run trend?”

To answer this question, Bernstein polled analysts covering banks, semiconductors, energy, autos and capital goods, or the European industries whose earnings have so far been most above trend.

“While near-term tactical earnings downgrades are expected in all cases, we do not see a significant risk of earnings returning to trend, for reasons which are idiosyncratic to each industry,” Bernstein wrote.

— Lisa Kailai Han

Check out the companies making headlines in extended trading.

Robinhood Markets — Shares jumped 9.5% after the trading platform posted a surprise earnings and revenue beat. Robinhood reported 3 cents in earnings per share, versus analysts’ expectations of a loss of 1 cent per share, according to LSEG, formerly known as Refinitiv. Revenue came in at $471 million, topping the $457 million expected by analysts. 

Lyft — The ride-hailing operator saw its shares soar 18.5% in extended trading after it reported strong fourth-quarter results and gave better-than-expected guidance. The company posted adjusted earnings per share of 18 cents for the fourth quarter, topping analysts’ estimates of 8 cents, according to LSEG. Revenue of $1.22 billion was in line with analysts’ expectations.

The full list can be found here.

— Hakyung Kim

U.S. stock futures opened little changed on Tuesday.

Dow Jones Industrial Average futures ticked down 19 points, or 0.05%. Futures tied to the S&P 500 traded near the flatline, while Nasdaq 100 futures gained 0.08%.

— Hakyung Kim