Robinhood and other retail brokerages took steps to tamp down the speculative frenzy surrounding companies such as GameStop, but the actions only sparked more volatility in the market and an outcry from users of the platforms.
Investors continued to closely watch the wild swings in GameStop, AMC and several other stocks which have become targets for hordes of online investors who have sent them skyrocketing in recent days, taking on big hedge funds who have bet they will fall.
The sharp selling is a shift from the market’s recent record-setting run and comes as investors focus on the outlook for the economy and corporate profits amid a still-raging coronavirus pandemic.
Across most of America, GameStop is just a place to buy a video game. On Wall Street, though, it’s become a battleground where swarms of smaller investors see themselves making an epic stand against the 1%.
Fishers-based First Internet saw its stock price climb to a one-year high in after-hours trading after the bank released its financial report Wednesday.
The hope on Wall Street is that such stimulus will help carry the economy until later this year, when more widespread COVID-19 vaccinations get daily life closer to normal.
Stocks have run out of steam since the S&P 500 set a record high a week ago amid optimism that COVID-19 vaccines and more stimulus from Washington will bring an economic recovery.
Banks and other financial companies added to recent gains as Treasury yields marched higher for the sixth straight day amid expectations that the economy will pull out of its slump after a powerful recovery sweeps the globe later this year.
Investors and analysts are anticipating the Biden administration and a Democrat-controlled Congress will try to deliver $2,000 checks to most Americans, increase spending on infrastructure and take other measures to nurse the economy amid the worsening pandemic.
The S&P 500, which ended 2020 at an all-time high, slid 1.5% after earlier dropping as much as 2.5%. It was the benchmark index’s biggest decline since late October.
Wall Street closed out a tumultuous year for stocks with more record highs Thursday, a fitting coda to the market’s stunning comeback from its historic plunge in the early weeks of the coronavirus pandemic.
Stocks have been mostly grinding higher in recent weeks, with indexes setting new highs, amid optimism that coronavirus vaccinations will pave the way in coming months for the economy to escape from the pandemic’s grip.
Among the companies losing ground Tuesday was Indianapolis-based Simon Property Group Inc., which fell 2.6% after the shopping mall operator completed its $3 billion purchase of an 80% stake in rival Taubman Centers.
U.S. investors cheered the U.S. aid package, restoring some of the optimism that drove global stocks to a record this month even as the pandemic escalated.
A new variant of the coronavirus in the U.K. and a wave of lockdowns and travel restrictions damped global trading, but in the U.S. a stimulus deal kept bigger losses at bay.
In a mixed and muted day of trading, the S&P 500 rose 6.55 points, or 0.2%, to 3,701.17. It’s within roughly 1 point of its record set last week.
Wall Street is growing increasingly confident that Democratic and Republican lawmakers will clinch a bill based on a $748 billion bipartisan proposal that would inject cash directly into the economy as prior benefits begin to expire at the end of the year.
The stock market tumbled through years’ worth of losses in just over a month this spring, only to turn around and pack an entire bull market’s worth of gains into less than nine months.
All major indexes for U.S. equities—the S&P 500, the Dow Jones industrial average, the Russell 2000 and the Nasdaq composite—closed at records. Such synchronized highs were last seen in January 2018.
The proposal filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission on Tuesday, if approved, would require all companies listed on the exchange to publicly disclose consistent, transparent diversity statistics about their board of directors.
