Here are the most important news items that investors need to start their trading day:
1. Earnings delight
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose more than 400 points, or 1.16%, Monday to kick off the week. Meanwhile, the S&P 500 rose 0.9%, while the Nasdaq Composite, which was dragged down by Tesla, increased just 0.61%. Investors were buoyed by what has broadly been a stronger corporate earnings season than many were anticipating. About four-fifths of companies in the S&P 500 that have already reported their quarterly results have exceeded Wall Street forecasts, according to FactSet. Follow live market updates.
2. Berkshire’s big day
Berkshire Hathaway shares hit an all-time high Monday after the company reported second-quarter earnings over the weekend. The Omaha-based giant’s operating earnings — which encompass profits from the many businesses it owns — totaled $10.043 billion for the quarter, 6.6% higher than the same quarter a year ago. Warren Buffett’s conglomerate also reported that its massive cash hoard has grown to nearly $150 billion. Berkshire’s Class A shares rose 3.4%, while the Class B shares rose 3.6%.
3. Tesla CFO out
Tesla announced Monday that its chief financial officer, Zach Kirkhorn, had stepped down from his role on Friday. He was replaced by chief accounting officer Vaibhav Taneja and will stay on to help with the transition, according to an SEC filing. Kirkhorn had been with the company since 2010 and had served as CFO since 2019. Shares of Tesla fell about 3% after the news, but recovered and closed a little less than 1% on the day.
4. Bank concerns
5. Zooming in
It might be worth taking a close look at the fine print of Zoom‘s terms of service. CNBC’s Hayden Field reported that a recent update seems to show the video platform wants to use some customer data to train its artificial intelligence models. The “service-generated data” that the company can use to train its AI does not provide an opt-out option, according to the terms. In a follow-up blog post, Zoom clarified that “for AI, we do not use audio, video or chat content for training our models without customer consent.”
— CNBC’s Alex Harring, Yun Li, Lora Kolodny, Rohan Goswami, Elliot Smith and Hayden Field contributed to this report.
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