The Week's Top Stories is a guided tour through the biggest market stories of the week, from winning stocks to brutal dips to the facts and forecasts generating buzz on Wall Street.
APPLE POWER
The stock market rallied on Friday after Apple reported its quarterly earnings, which showed a decline in revenue but solid iPhone sales. The stock rose 5 percent, buoying the rest of the market, with some help from the latest job report as well. The U.S. economy added 253,000 jobs in April and the unemployment dropped to 3.4 percent, despite reports of layoffs across industries and continued fears of a recession. The rally comes just two days after the Federal Reserve announced a quarter-percent rate hike as expected, with many expecting the central bank to now ease up on tightening. Still, the labor market staying tight could change that.
BANK STOCKS RALLY
Regional bank shares also rebounded at the end of the week. Shares of struggling banks such as PacWest and Western Alliance jumped 81 and 49 percent respectively. Bank stocks had dropped precipitously in recent sessions, as investors braced for more bank failures. Data indicating strength in the economy helped temper those fears, and bank stocks rose accordingly. Shares of First Horizon were also up, despite its recent announcement that a planned merger with TD Bank was collapsing. Relatedly, JPMorgan earlier this week agreed to purchase the ailing First Republic bank.
FORD EARNINGS
Ford, meanwhile, benefitted from the rally, but nonetheless is down for the week due in part to a mixed earnings report. The automaker posted strong first-quarter revenue and profit, as demand for trucks and SUVs remains robust, but had a less optimistic outlook for the year in response to continued losses in its electric vehicle unit. This doesn't bode well for the ongoing EV transition, but Ford has warned previously that the division could see losses for the foreseeable future.
RIDESHARE FIRMS DIVERGE
Shares of Uber are up more than 17 percent for the week after the rideshare giant reported strong earnings and a 29 percent jump in revenue. At the same time, shares of Lyft tanked 16 percent, as investors responded to a dim outlook for the coming year.
Following a session in which investors saw gains across the major indexes, Wealth Consulting Group CEO Jimmy Lee says investors need to remember that midterm election years tend to be more volatile in general.
Stocks closed lower to end the last trading day of May, but the S&P 500 and the Dow Jones both rose over the past month. The Federal Reserve in early May raised interest rates by half a percentage point as it tries to fight inflation, but the question continues to linger: will we enter a recession as we try to tame inflation? Anthony Saccaro, Founder & President of Providence Financial, joins Closing Bell to discuss today's close, the possibility of a recession, where he is telling clients to look for opportunities, and more.
The semiconductor industry is at an inflection point as it tries to fully recover from the worst of pandemic-era headwinds. While Broadcom has announced it will buy cloud computing company VMware, Nvidia is lowering its current quarterly outlook. Meanwhile, TSMC and Intel are contemplating raising prices -- again -- thanks to higher materials costs. Where does the industry go from here? Ted Mortonson, technology strategist at Baird, joins Closing Bell to discuss.
Memorial Day rang in the unofficial start of summer here in the United States -- and with it, the unofficial start of summer travel. Whether consumers traveled by air or by land, they probably experienced some form of frustration over the weekend. Flyers faced delays and cancellations, and drivers faced the most expensive gas prices ever recorded on Memorial Day. Zach Griff, Senior Aviation Reporter for the Points Guy, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Next-generation gaming ecosystem Joystick recently raised $8 million in a seed round and is in the process of raising a $110 million Series A funding round. Gaming ecosystems are a relatively new type of platform in the Web3 space, allowing users to maximize their play-to-earn gaming opportunities, exchange crypto-currencies, and sell their digital assets. Joystick says its platform is flipping the current model on its head by giving players the opportunity to keep 100% of the revenue they earn. Robin Defay, co-founder and CEO of Joystick, and Michael Le, co-founder of Joystick and TikTok content creator, join Cheddar News' Closing Bell to discuss.
Abe Stein, Head of Innovation at Sports Innovation Lab, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he explains why the top four spots on his company's 2022 list are European soccer clubs and discusses Sports Innovation Lab's plan to publish data on women's pro sports teams in the not-too-distant future.
Joel Birch, Co-Founder and CEO of Stacked, joins Cheddar News' Closing Bell, where he explains why he doesn't see any new catalysts that would lead to a Bitcoin rally at the moment. He also reiterates that now is a good time for long-term Bitcoin investors to buy low.
The dating app Bumble has sponsored bills and pushed lawmakers to criminalize the online practice of sending unsolicited nudes or “cyberflashing." Payton Iheme, Bumble's head of public policy for the Americas, joined Cheddar News to discuss why the app was going after the harassing behavior beyond its own platform. "Now, while we went to work internally in the company, and we created something called private detector to automatically blur those images so the user can decide if they want to see them, there's nothing for the rest of the internet," she said. "And so that's why we went to work with these laws."
