Shutterstock
Stock futures and gold rise ahead of Powell speech – Bezos betting on housing slide – Sam Bankman-Fried down to $100,000 – Alibaba’s Jack Ma allegedly living in Tokyo
In premarket trading on Wednesday, stocks rose slightly as investors await comments from a scheduled speech by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell. The S&P 500 notched up 0.2% in premarket trading, while futures on the Dow Jones Industrial Average inched up by 0.1%, and the technology-heavy Nasdaq Composite ticked up by 0.3%, Yahoo Finance reported.
Gold futures also traded higher for the second straight day as the US dollar softened against a basket of currencies.
The benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury was up 0.022% at a yield of 3.77%.
In oil markets on Wednesday, the global benchmark Brent crude rose 2.3% to $82.90 a barrel, while WTI crude oil climbed 2.6% to $80.25 a barrel.
Billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is betting on a downturn in the housing market. He has taken early action with the real estate investing platform Arrived Homes and doubled down on his bet earlier this year.
Arrived Homes offers investors shares of single-family rentals, as well as short-term vacation rentals, with investments ranging from $100 to $10,000. Investors can use dollar cost averaging and invest in fractional real estate through all market cycles, Yahoo Finance reported.
Former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried says his bank account was down to $100,000 the last time he checked. His personal wealth reached $26.5 billion at one point, Axios reported. The fall of the crypto exchange wiped out billions of dollars in market value in a matter of days. The company’s investors and creditors remain in the dark about how much, if anything, they will be able to recoup as FTX works through a messy bankruptcy process.
Jack Ma, the billionaire founder of Alibaba, disappeared in 2020 after angering Chinese authorities. Intense regulatory scrutiny on his businesses followed, as well as a wider crackdown on tech firms in China. Some feared that Ma may have been imprisoned. But according to a new report by the Financial Times, which cited people with direct knowledge of the billionaire’s whereabouts, Ma has allegedly been lying low in Tokyo for the past six months.
