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Stocks moved up slightly, but futures fell on election results, Major crypto collapse, Elon Musk selling more Tesla stock, Meta laying off over 11,000 employees, Netflix exploring investing in live sports, and more financial news.
Dow Jones futures fell 150 points, or 0.6%, Wednesday morning as early US election news trickled in. The S&P 500 futures moved down 0.55%, while NASDAQ 100 futures lost 0.7% in early-morning action, Investor’s Business Daily reported.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 1%, as the S&P 500 gained 0.6%, while the NASDAQ composite climbed 0.5%.
The 10-year Treasury yield notched up 4.13% Wednesday morning.
A major shakeup in the cryptocurrency world on Tuesday after crypto exchange Binance announced plans to buy rival FTX’s non-U.S. assets amid liquidity concerns at the latter firm, Kiplinger reported.
Bitcoin tumbled on the news by 12.6% to $18,184 on Tuesday but continued to fall on Wednesday, plunging by over fourteen percent to bottom out at $17,603, crashing to a yearly low, according to Coinmarketcap, news.com.au reported.
Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency, also plummeted by over 17% in the 24-hour span.
FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried saw a massive loss of $16 billion, which amounted to 94% of his net worth. In recent years his net worth had soared to $26 billion at its height, Unilad reported.
“Binance had to step in to save Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX crypto exchange,” said one senior market strategist. “This is a major setback for many investors in cryptos who viewed [Bankman-Fried] as a white knight and one of the leaders in the space that was supposed to thrive once we got beyond this crypto winter.”
Tesla stock traded up a fraction on Wednesday morning after a report emerged that CEO Elon Musk sold nearly $4 billion worth of Tesla shares over the past few days, Investor’s Business Daily reported.
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, announced it would be laying off 13% of its staff, which amounts to more than 11,000 employees, according to the letter sent to employees on Wednesday by CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
“I’ve decided to reduce the size of our team by about 13% and let more than 11,000 of our talented employees go,” Zuckerberg said in the letter. “We are also taking a number of additional steps to become a leaner and more efficient company by cutting discretionary spending and extending our hiring freeze through Q1.”
The announcement motivated investors, with shares of Meta up 4% in premarket trading, CNBC reported. The move comes amid a 19 percent jump in year-over-year costs and expenses for Meta in the third quarter, about $22.1 billion.
Previously, Meta’s guidance in late October about its upcoming fourth-quarter earnings sent shares plummeting by nearly 20 percent.
Netflix is exploring investments in live sports broadcasting, recently bidding for streaming rights for sports leagues, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter, Reuters reported. Allegedly, Netflix recently bid for streaming rights for the ATP tennis tour for some European countries, including France and the U.K., but dropped out.
