Finance

A General Electric (GE) sign is seen at the second China International Import Expo (CIIE) in Shanghai, China November 6, 2019.
Aly Song | Reuters

Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading.
General Electric — Shares slid more than 11% despite the industrial company reporting top and bottom line beats for the first quarter. CEO Lawrence Culp said GE is “trending toward the low end” of its guidance due in part to inflation pressure. Additionally, pressures from supply chain issues, the war in Ukraine and the spread of Covid hurt GE’s revenue by six percentage points, Culp said.

Sherwin-Williams — Shares of the paint company jumped more than 9% after the company beat Wall Street estimates for its first-quarter earnings. Sherwin-Williams posted earnings of $1.61 per share last quarter, topping estimates of $1.54 per share, according to FactSet’s StreetAccount. The company’s revenue for the quarter rose more than 7% to $5 billion from last year, also beating expectations. 
United Parcel Service — The shipping stock dropped 2.6% despite a stronger-than-expected first quarter report. UPS earned an adjusted $3.05 per share on $24.38 billion of revenue. Analysts surveyed by Refinitiv were expecting $2.88 per share and $23.78 billion of revenue. The company maintained its guidance, but CEO Carol Tome said on a conference call with analysts that e-commerce growth was slowing relative to the boom during Covid.
Warner Bros. Discovery — The media giant’s shares fell more than 4% after the company warned its 2022 profit would be lower than expected. Chief financial officer Gunnar Wiedenfels cited “unexpected projects” and weaker first-quarter WarnerMedia operating profit on the company’s earnings call.
Waste Management — The waste services company got a 5.7% boost in its shares after it reported earnings and revenue for the first quarter that topped analysts’ estimates. The company made a profit of $1.29 per share, versus estimates of $1.14, according to FactSet’s StreetAccount. Revenue came in at $4.66 billion, compared to expectations of $4.45 billion.
Zions Bancorporation — The regional bank’s shares dropped more than 7% following a downgrade by Raymond James to market perform. The company also posted net interest income that was lower than estimates, according to FactSet’s StreetAccount. Zions’ financial guidance, which was unchanged, included moderate growth over the next year.

Universal Health Services — Shares of the health services operator fell about 9.5% following the company’s quarterly results, which include weaker-than-expected earnings of $2.15 per share. Analysts estimated earnings of $2.47 per share, according to FactSet’s StreetAccount.
3M — Shares of the industrial conglomerate declined by more than 3% despite the company reporting quarterly earnings and revenue that came in above consensus estimates. 3M also said it anticipates weaker mask demand and rising cost pressures.
SeaWorld Entertainment — Shares of SeaWorld dipped nearly 4% even as Rosenblatt Securities initiated coverage of the stock with a buy rating. The bullish outlook is based on a clear path to profitability laid out by Scott Ross, SeaWorld’s board chairman and a major investor, that indicates roughly 24% upside for the theme park and entertainment company
Redfin — The real estate company’s shares fell 6.6% after Piper Sandler downgraded its shares to underweight, citing a challenging housing outlook its analysts think will only get worse over the next two years as 30-year mortgage rates jump above 5%.
 — CNBC’s Jesse Pound, Sarah Min and Yun Li contributed reporting

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A Fidelity Investments location in New York.
Scott Mlyn | CNBC

Fidelity Investments said Tuesday it will offer investors the option to put bitcoin in their 401(k)s, making it the first provider to offer crypto for retirement savings.
The crypto offering will be available for 23,000 employers that use Fidelity to administer their retirement accounts by mid-year 2022. With $11.3 trillion in assets under administration, Fidelity is the nation’s largest retirement-plan provider and its decision could make crypto even more popular and mainstream.

“There is growing interest from plan sponsors for vehicles that enable them to provide their employees access to digital assets in defined contribution plans, and in turn from individuals with an appetite to incorporate cryptocurrencies into their long-term investment strategies,” said Dave Gray, head of workplace retirement offerings and platforms at Fidelity Investments.
Cloud and intelligence firm MicroStrategy will be the first employer to offer bitcoin in their retirement plan. The Wall Street Journal reported the news earlier Monday morning.
Still, regulators have urged caution against involving cryptocurrencies in 401(k)s. Just last month, the Department of Labor asked plan fiduciaries to “exercise extreme care” before they consider adding a cryptocurrency option to a 401(k) plan’s investment menu for plan participants.
The Department of Labor cited concerns of speculation, volatility as well as high valuation. Meanwhile, it warned of major custodial and recordkeeping issues, saying simply losing or forgetting a password can result in the loss of the asset forever.
Fidelity said the Digital Assets Account is a custom plan account that holds bitcoin and short-term money market investments to provide the liquidity needed for the account to facilitate daily transactions on behalf of the investor.
Bitcoin in the DAA will be held on the Fidelity Digital Assets custody platform to ensure institutional-grade security, Fidelity said.

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Nasdaq 100 futures fell slightly Monday evening after stocks bounced in the afternoon and ahead of Big Tech earnings.
Futures tied to the tech focused index fell 0.1%. Dow Jones Industrial Average futures and S&P 500 futures were little changed.

In regular trading Monday, the Nasdaq Composite jumped 1.3%. The Dow advanced 0.7%, after cutting a 500-point loss from earlier in the day, and the S&P 500 gained 0.6%.
The moves came as tech names like Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta Platforms rallied in the afternoon, amid falling interest rates and ahead of an intense week of earnings for mega cap tech stocks. Twitter also jumped after its board accepted Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s offer to take it private.
The bounce was welcomed by investors after stocks ended the previous week on a sour note, with the Dow falling to its fourth down week in a row and the S&P and Nasdaq hitting three-week losing streaks Friday. The tech-heavy Nasdaq is attempting to break out of bear market territory, sitting 19.8% from its record.
Whether this is a bottom remains to be seen. Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda, told CNBC there’s still a lot of optimism about the U.S. economy and said he anticipates a relief rally from here.
“A third of the S&P is reporting [earnings] this week, and you’re probably going to see much of the same:  lots of top and bottom line beats. Companies are going to talk about margin pressures and passing on price increases to the consumer, but they’re still going to highlight there’s still overall optimism about the economy.”

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Between the continuation of earnings beats and a quiet period from the Federal Reserve, there will likely be a relief rally in the market, Moya added.
“We’re not going to be getting more nervousness about Fed tightening, because we won’t be hearing much more about it until the May meeting,” he said.
Market bull Tom Lee, head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, said even though he’d expected a “treacherous” first half to the year, the market has been worse than even he expected, with inflation worsening relative to market expectations. Nevertheless, he remains optimistic.
“When the bond market is screaming for Fed to be a bit tighter, it’s tough for stocks to hold up and I think that’s what we’re kind of going through now, but, I don’t think that means that we should be selling equities here either,” he said on CNBC’s “Closing Bell: Overtime” Monday.
“Markets just want to have some sense of when this could end,” he added. “If inflation doesn’t reach some sort of apex that’s concerning for markets, but I also don’t think it’s set in stone that inflation is going to continue to be a problem even in the second half.”
Tech earnings will kick off on Tuesday after the bell with Alphabet and Microsoft. Meta, Amazon and Apple will report later in the week. UPS and 3M are also scheduled to report in the morning.
In economic data, investors are expecting fresh numbers for new home sales and consumer confidence on Tuesday morning.

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EMERGING ECONOMIES hoping to grow their way into the ranks of the rich have faced a seemingly never-ending series of setbacks in recent years. Trade tensions, a pandemic, supply-chain snarls, inflation and war have together dealt them serious blows. Over the past three years more than half the population of the emerging world lived in countries where income growth, on a purchasing-power-parity basis, lagged behind that in America—the first such episode since the 1980s.The IMF forecasts that economic output across emerging markets will expand by 3.8% this year and 4.4% in 2023, figures that have been revised down sharply since last year and which fall short of the 5% average annual rate in the decade before covid-19. As the contours of the post-pandemic landscape come into focus, a lost decade—a period of slow growth, recurring financial crises and social unrest—for the world’s poorer countries looks increasingly plausible.Emerging economies have experienced tough times before. In the 1960s and 1970s they enjoyed a period of relative prosperity, which fed optimism about the prospects for the world’s poor. But the good times were followed by what William Easterly of New York University described as the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Over the ten years to 1990, annual growth in GDP per person in the median emerging economy fell below zero (see chart 1). From the late 1990s onwards a new boom began, which reset expectations about the economic potential of the developing world. More recently, though, the pendulum has swung back again, and growth has proved harder to come by. Emerging markets face structural impediments, such as financial woes and changing trade patterns, that are reminiscent of those that confronted them in the 1980s and 1990s.Financial pressures pose the most acute threat. In the early 1980s the Federal Reserve raised interest rates dramatically as it sought to tame inflation. For poor economies that had borrowed heavily in the preceding years, the ensuing tightening in financial conditions and strengthening of the dollar were too much to bear. Waves of debt and banking crises followed.Some of those conditions seem familiar today. Both public and private debt in the emerging world rose steadily as a share of GDP during the 2010s, and rocketed during the pandemic. Public-debt ratios across middle-income economies now stand at record highs, and indebtedness in the poorest countries has risen towards the debilitating levels of the 1990s. Of the world’s 70-odd low-income countries, more than 10%, including Chad and Somalia, already face unsustainable debt burdens. Another 50%, including Ethiopia and Laos, are at high risk of attaining such status, according to the World Bank. A decade ago only about a third of poor countries were in, or at high risk of, debt distress.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fuelled surges in food and energy costs. Wheat and oil are both about 50% more expensive than they were a year ago. For importing countries this increases the fiscal costs of food and energy subsidies, drains hard-currency reserves and weighs on economic growth. Rising prices also intensify pressure on central banks in the rich world to tighten monetary policy. Investors expect the Fed to raise its benchmark interest rate by nearly three percentage points in 2022; that would be the largest rate rise in a single year since the early 1990s. Add in the effect of a shrinking Fed balance-sheet, and the tightening this year could be the most dramatic since the 1980s.Markets are already heaping pressure on vulnerable emerging economies. As capital flows to America to take advantage of higher rates, the dollar is strengthening: it is up by more than 10% over the past year. Funding costs in the emerging world are rising with it. The yield on the hard-currency debt of the median emerging economy has risen by more than a third since the summer. The share of issuers with bonds trading at distressed levels has more than doubled, to just over a fifth, according to the IMF. That includes Ukraine, but also Egypt and Ghana.More countries will probably follow the lead of Sri Lanka, which on April 12th defaulted on its hard-currency government debt. Nonetheless, the systemic crises that were a feature of the previous lost decades may be avoided. Many middle-income economies have bolstered their financial defences, by beefing up foreign-exchange reserves, for instance. Investors have become more discerning, reducing the risk of wider contagion. The bigger worry instead is that debt loads will hit growth, by limiting governments’ room to cut taxes and invest in education and infrastructure. Local banks that have lent heavily to governments may find their capacity to lend to private borrowers impaired if the bonds they hold lose value. Home-country government debt now makes up about 17% of bank assets across emerging economies, up from 13% in the early 2010s and well above the 7.5% average in rich countries.Another headwind comes from global trade. Developing economies’ fortunes have long risen and fallen in line with it. From 1960 to 1980, goods trade as a share of world GDP doubled from 9% to 18%; during the lost decades, by contrast, it stagnated. Trade then soared again as global supply chains expanded across East and South-East Asia in particular. But that interconnectedness is once more at risk. Geopolitical tensions, national campaigns for self-sufficiency and concerns about supply-chain reliability may weigh on trade, reducing poor economies’ opportunities to borrow technology and know-how from foreign firms, and sell to the rich world.The global economy will also suffer from the sputtering of the largest emerging market of them all, and the world’s primary growth engine: China. Between 1970 and 2000 America and Europe accounted for nearly half of global GDP growth. The sharp and sustained slowdown in rich-world growth that began in the 1970s thus weighed heavily on the global economy and the prospects for the emerging world. Fortunes turned in the 2000s, however, as an explosive expansion in China led it to contribute more to global growth than America and Europe combined. A modest deceleration in China, to GDP growth rates of around 5%, would not doom the global economy to stagnation. Draconian covid lockdowns, a protracted property-market bust and the potential costs of geopolitical misadventures, however, could do great damage.Some emerging markets stand to benefit from an era of stagnation. Firms wary of dependence on China could move production to other low-cost places. Rich countries hoping to prevent poorer ones from drawing closer to Russia and China could lower trade barriers and increase investment abroad, boosting growth prospects in the process. High commodity prices, while they last, will buoy the fortunes of food, energy and metals exporters.Overall, however, the higher debts and forgone investment in human and physical capital of the past few years will take a heavy toll. The IMF forecasts that GDP across the emerging world will remain some 6% below its pre-pandemic trend at the end of 2024. (By comparison, GDP in most of the rich world is expected to be less than 1% below trend.) Without bold initiatives to lower debt burdens, invest in public goods and expand trade, such a dismal performance might be just a taste of what is to come.For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

EMERGING ECONOMIES hoping to grow their way into the ranks of the rich have faced a seemingly never-ending series of setbacks in recent years. Trade tensions, a pandemic, supply-chain snarls, inflation and war have together dealt them serious blows. Over the past three years more than half the population of the emerging world lived in countries where income growth, on a purchasing-power-parity basis, lagged behind that in America—the first such episode since the 1980s.The IMF forecasts that economic output across emerging markets will expand by 3.8% this year and 4.4% in 2023, figures that have been revised down sharply since last year and which fall short of the 5% average annual rate in the decade before covid-19. As the contours of the post-pandemic landscape come into focus, a lost decade—a period of slow growth, recurring financial crises and social unrest—for the world’s poorer countries looks increasingly plausible.Emerging economies have experienced tough times before. In the 1960s and 1970s they enjoyed a period of relative prosperity, which fed optimism about the prospects for the world’s poor. But the good times were followed by what William Easterly of New York University described as the lost decades of the 1980s and 1990s. Over the ten years to 1990, annual growth in GDP per person in the median emerging economy fell below zero (see chart 1). From the late 1990s onwards a new boom began, which reset expectations about the economic potential of the developing world. More recently, though, the pendulum has swung back again, and growth has proved harder to come by. Emerging markets face structural impediments, such as financial woes and changing trade patterns, that are reminiscent of those that confronted them in the 1980s and 1990s.Financial pressures pose the most acute threat. In the early 1980s the Federal Reserve raised interest rates dramatically as it sought to tame inflation. For poor economies that had borrowed heavily in the preceding years, the ensuing tightening in financial conditions and strengthening of the dollar were too much to bear. Waves of debt and banking crises followed.Some of those conditions seem familiar today. Both public and private debt in the emerging world rose steadily as a share of GDP during the 2010s, and rocketed during the pandemic. Public-debt ratios across middle-income economies now stand at record highs, and indebtedness in the poorest countries has risen towards the debilitating levels of the 1990s. Of the world’s 70-odd low-income countries, more than 10%, including Chad and Somalia, already face unsustainable debt burdens. Another 50%, including Ethiopia and Laos, are at high risk of attaining such status, according to the World Bank. A decade ago only about a third of poor countries were in, or at high risk of, debt distress.Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has fuelled surges in food and energy costs. Wheat and oil are both about 50% more expensive than they were a year ago. For importing countries this increases the fiscal costs of food and energy subsidies, drains hard-currency reserves and weighs on economic growth. Rising prices also intensify pressure on central banks in the rich world to tighten monetary policy. Investors expect the Fed to raise its benchmark interest rate by nearly three percentage points in 2022; that would be the largest rate rise in a single year since the early 1990s. Add in the effect of a shrinking Fed balance-sheet, and the tightening this year could be the most dramatic since the 1980s.Markets are already heaping pressure on vulnerable emerging economies. As capital flows to America to take advantage of higher rates, the dollar is strengthening: it is up by more than 10% over the past year. Funding costs in the emerging world are rising with it. The yield on the hard-currency debt of the median emerging economy has risen by more than a third since the summer. The share of issuers with bonds trading at distressed levels has more than doubled, to just over a fifth, according to the IMF. That includes Ukraine, but also Egypt and Ghana.More countries will probably follow the lead of Sri Lanka, which on April 12th defaulted on its hard-currency government debt. Nonetheless, the systemic crises that were a feature of the previous lost decades may be avoided. Many middle-income economies have bolstered their financial defences, by beefing up foreign-exchange reserves, for instance. Investors have become more discerning, reducing the risk of wider contagion. The bigger worry instead is that debt loads will hit growth, by limiting governments’ room to cut taxes and invest in education and infrastructure. Local banks that have lent heavily to governments may find their capacity to lend to private borrowers impaired if the bonds they hold lose value. Home-country government debt now makes up about 17% of bank assets across emerging economies, up from 13% in the early 2010s and well above the 7.5% average in rich countries.Another headwind comes from global trade. Developing economies’ fortunes have long risen and fallen in line with it. From 1960 to 1980, goods trade as a share of world GDP doubled from 9% to 18%; during the lost decades, by contrast, it stagnated. Trade then soared again as global supply chains expanded across East and South-East Asia in particular. But that interconnectedness is once more at risk. Geopolitical tensions, national campaigns for self-sufficiency and concerns about supply-chain reliability may weigh on trade, reducing poor economies’ opportunities to borrow technology and know-how from foreign firms, and sell to the rich world.The global economy will also suffer from the sputtering of the largest emerging market of them all, and the world’s primary growth engine: China. Between 1970 and 2000 America and Europe accounted for nearly half of global GDP growth. The sharp and sustained slowdown in rich-world growth that began in the 1970s thus weighed heavily on the global economy and the prospects for the emerging world. Fortunes turned in the 2000s, however, as an explosive expansion in China led it to contribute more to global growth than America and Europe combined. A modest deceleration in China, to GDP growth rates of around 5%, would not doom the global economy to stagnation. Draconian covid lockdowns, a protracted property-market bust and the potential costs of geopolitical misadventures, however, could do great damage.Some emerging markets stand to benefit from an era of stagnation. Firms wary of dependence on China could move production to other low-cost places. Rich countries hoping to prevent poorer ones from drawing closer to Russia and China could lower trade barriers and increase investment abroad, boosting growth prospects in the process. High commodity prices, while they last, will buoy the fortunes of food, energy and metals exporters.Overall, however, the higher debts and forgone investment in human and physical capital of the past few years will take a heavy toll. The IMF forecasts that GDP across the emerging world will remain some 6% below its pre-pandemic trend at the end of 2024. (By comparison, GDP in most of the rich world is expected to be less than 1% below trend.) Without bold initiatives to lower debt burdens, invest in public goods and expand trade, such a dismal performance might be just a taste of what is to come.For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter. More

Pankaj Nangia | Bloomberg | Getty Images

Check out the companies making headlines in extended trading.
Cadence Design Systems – Shares of computer software company gained 5% after hours following the company’s quarterly earnings reports. Earnings and revenue for the first quarter both came in above consensus forecasts, according to FactSet. The company also issued upbeat full year earnings and revenue guidance.

Heidrick & Struggles – The executive search firm’s shares fell more than 4% in extended trading, despite reporting an increase in profit and revenue for the first quarter. The company also recorded a slew of increased spending for consolidates salaries and benefits, cost of services and administrative expenses.
SBA Communications Corporation – Shares of the wireless communications company saw its stock rise 1.5% after reporting quarterly results, which included adjusted EBITDA that beat FactSet estimates and better-than-expected full year financial guidance. The company also announced it’s repurchasing 1.3 million shares.
Packaging Corp of America – The packaging company’s shares advanced 1.6% after company earnings. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter came in at $467.2 million, compared to FactSet estimates of $443.1 million.

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Kraken will open an office in Abu Dhabi and become the first exchange to offer UAE dirham trading after receiving a full license to operate in the country, Curtis Ting, Kraken’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told CNBC.
A sense of “greater regulatory clarity” is the reason for the influx of cryptocurrency businesses in Dubai and Abu Dhabi, according to Citi.
The Middle East is one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency markets in the world, making up 7% of global trading volumes, according to Chainalysis. 

Jack Guez | Afp | Getty Images

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — U.S. cryptocurrency exchange Kraken is expanding into the Middle East and will open its regional headquarters in Abu Dhabi after receiving a full license to operate a regulated trading platform in the UAE.
“We’re incredibly excited to be able to set up our operations right in the ADGM [Abu Dhabi Global Market] itself to operate a virtual asset platform that finally offers Dirham pairs for investors in the region,” Curtis Ting, Kraken’s managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, told CNBC’s Dan Murphy.

Kraken will become the first cryptocurrency exchange to offer direct funding and trading in UAE dirhams against bitcoin, ether and a range of other virtual assets, after gaining regulatory approval from the ADGM and Financial Services Regulatory Authority for its local launch.  
“For us, it’s really important to facilitate access to global markets and global liquidity by making sure that investors and traders in the region have access to local currencies,” Ting said. 
Kraken, which launched in 2011 and operates in over 60 countries, said the UAE launch marks a wider play into an increasingly lucrative region. The Middle East is one of the fastest-growing cryptocurrency markets in the world, making up 7% of global trading volumes, according to Chainalysis. 
The UAE transacts approximately $25 billion worth of cryptocurrency each year. It ranks third by volume in the region, behind Lebanon (about $26 billion) and Turkey ($132.4 billion), according to Chainalysis data studied between July 2020 and June 2021. 

“One of the reasons we see an influx of entrepreneurs, builders, operators and developers coming into Abu Dhabi and Dubai … is because there is a sense of greater regulatory clarity at ADGM, in Dubai, and at a federal level,” Ronit Ghose, global head of fintech and digital at Citi, told CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Thursday.  

“It’s frankly amazing some of the talent the UAE has attracted in the last 12 to 24 months during COVID,” Ghose said. “Is it really beginning to establish itself as both a crypto hub and a Web3 hub.” 

More competition

Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, is among those also considering a bigger presence in the Middle East, where cryptocurrency trading is becoming increasingly mainstream. 
Binance was given approval to operate in Abu Dhabi in recent weeks, and will recruit for over 100 positions in the country. Fellow exchange Bybit was also given approval to open a headquarters in Dubai last month, while FTX also received a virtual-asset license in Dubai and will set up a regional headquarters soon. 

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Rival financial centers in Singapore and Hong Kong are also hoping to create fully regulated environments for cryptocurrency trading, seeking to deepen regulatory mechanisms to attract investment and trading volumes in an increasingly competitive landscape. 

‘Gray list’

But while the Emirates might be winning over some of the world’s largest crypto companies, it’s also coming under increasing international scrutiny for not doing enough to crack down on so-called dirty money flows. Recent reports claim that crypto firms in the UAE have been deluged with requests to liquidate billions of dollars of virtual currency, as Russians seek a safe haven for their fortunes, including within Dubai’s property market, amid the war in Ukraine. Last month, the world’s main anti-money laundering watchdog, the Financial Action Task Force, also placed the UAE on its “gray list” of countries that need extra monitoring. The UAE joins Syria, Turkey and Panama in a list of countries which, according to the FATF, need to address money-laundering threats.

“It is important for us to pay attention to AML (anti money laundering) to KYC (know-your-customer) and other important compliance matters,” Ting told CNBC.”I think trust needs to be placed in the controls that regulators are putting in place to make sure that if a consumer is going to be exposed and have access to platforms that offer cryptocurrencies, they’re doing so in a way that there’s some accountability.” 
Correction: This story has been updated to correct the job title of Ronit Ghose.

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Traders on the floor of the NYSE, April 14, 2022.
Source: NYSE

U.S. stock futures fell on Sunday night amid a four-week losing streak for the Dow Jones Industrial Average as investors weighed the likelihood of rising interest rates. Wall Street is also bracing for a stacked week of earnings, including reports from major tech companies such as Amazon and Apple.
Dow Jones Industrial Average futures lost 36 points, or 0.1%. S&P 500 futures dipped 0.2% and Nasdaq 100 futures declined 0.2%.

Those moves come after Friday’s selloff, with the Dow dropping 981.36 points, or 2.8%, to 33,811.40 in what was the Dow’s worst day since October 2020. The S&P 500 fell 2.8% to 4,271.78, or its worst day since March. The Nasdaq Composite dropped by 2.6% to 12,839.29.
All the major averages closed down lower last week, with the Dow falling 1.9% for the week, or its fourth straight weekly decline. The S&P 500 and the Nasdaq dropped 2.8% and 3.8% for the week respectively, posting their third straight weekly decline.
“There has been severe damage in many areas of the market, while money rotated into perceived ‘defensives’ like Utilities, Staples, Pharma, and even mega-cap growth,” said Jonathan Krinsky, chief market technician at BTIG. “Those areas, despite their strong momentum, are now unwinding lower, while the low-momentum names continue to trend down.”
Investors will be watching Twitter, which reportedly is re-examining Elon Musk’s takeover bid after the billionaire investor disclosed he secured $46.5 billion in financing, according to a Wall Street Journal report, citing unnamed sources.
Wall Street is also bracing for what will be the busiest week yet in corporate earnings season. About 160 companies in the S&P 500 are expected to report earnings this week, and all eyes will be on reports from big tech companies, including Amazon, Apple, Google-parent Alphabet, Meta Platforms and Microsoft.

Coca-Cola is expected to report before the bell on Monday with a management call set at 8:30 a.m. ET. Other companies reporting on Monday include Activision Blizzard, Otis, Whirlpool and Zions Bancorp.
Traders are also looking forward to a key measure of inflation this week. The personal consumer expenditures index is set to be released Friday before the bell. In February, the core PCE jumped 5.4%.

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