The bears are still out hunting bulls on Wall Street as stocks deal with rampant inflation and the Fed aggressively raising rates.
Apple stock is nearing a bear market on Thursday, dont 19.72% year to date, weighed down by ongoing negative sentiment in the markets on anything that is remotely tied to tech.
Not helping sentiment either are fresh comments from Fed chief Jerome Powell.
The fearless Fed leader said “pain” may have to occur as the monetary policy body looks to get inflation under control. Powell — speaking in a Marketplace interview — suggested a soft economic landing during the rate hiking process may not happen.
If the Fed’s actions do tip the economy into a recession, it would unlikely be a pleasant experience for investors (as Powell seemingly suggested).
According to Bloomberg data, 14 times over the last 95 years the S&P 500 has plunged more than 20%, meaning it has hit bear market territory. In just two of those examples did the U.S. economy not contract within a year: 1987 and 1966.
Now onto some super hot tickers on Yahoo Finance for this Friday:
Twitter: Now we know why Twitter’s stock price has been trading below Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s $54.20 offer price for weeks.
“Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than 5% of users,” Musk said in a tweet today.
The stock will likely open Friday’s session below where it was just a few weeks before Musk’s early April bid for the company. This entire situation is turning into a debacle for Musk, Twitter employees, and civilization.
Robinhood: One person able to close the deal is FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. The crypto heavyweight has taken a 7.6% stake in trading platform Robinhood — valued at $648 million —in what he has dubbed a personal investment. The billionaire (net worth around $11 billion even after recent crypto rout) didn’t rule out, however, pushing for management and other changes at a company that could only be viewed as a colossal letdown since its overhyped 2021 IPO. Shares of Robinhood surged more than 20% in pre-market trading.
Ultimately, Bankman-Fried may be making a defensive move here on Robinhood. Coinbase execs got asked on their earnings call this week if they should buy Robinhood to offer a more complete product to users. They shot down the notion, saying they have no interest in getting into the stock trading business.
But where there is smoke there is fire (especially when the stock prices of all these companies have crashed), and Bankman-Fried appears to understand that.
Affirm: Shares of the buy-now-pay later outfit soared more than 30% in pre-market trading after a better than feared first quarter. Affirm stock is the top trending ticker on the Yahoo Finance platform. Wall Street generally views the quarter as going a long way to tamping down concerns Affirm can’t perform well during an economic slowdown.
The company did show a 73% increase in gross merchandise value in a quarter where U.S. GDP contracted 1.4%. We’ll put these questions to Affirm CFO Michael Linford on Yahoo Finance Live in the 10am ET hour today.
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
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