Finance

Ford Motor Co. CEO Jim Farley walks to speak at a news conference at the Rouge Complex in Dearborn, Michigan, September 17, 2020.
Rebecca Cook | Reuters

Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading.
Ford Motor — Shares of the automaker soared 8.7% after a stellar earnings report. Ford Motor, which reported earnings Wednesday, nearly doubled Wall Street’s earnings expectations and slightly beat revenue projections for the third quarter. The automaker also increased its annual guidance for the second time this year.

eBay — The e-commerce company’s stock fell 6.8% after a weak fourth-quarter revenue guidance. eBay topped earnings expectations by 1 cent per share and beat revenue estimates, according to Refinitiv, however.
Tesla — Shares of Tesla continued climbing as Piper Sandler hiked its price target on the electric vehicle stock to a new Street high. The stock traded up 3.8%. Piper Sandler raised its share price forecast to $1,300 from $1,200, implying 25% potential upside from Wednesday’s close.
Apple, Amazon — Big Tech names Apple and Amazon traded higher ahead of their quarterly earnings reports after the bell Thursday. Apple gained 2.5%, while Amazon rose 1.6%.
Caterpillar — Shares of Caterpillar rose 1.7% after it reported a third-quarter beat on bottom-line estimates despite a slight revenue miss. The heavy equipment maker recorded earnings of $2.66 per share, beating analysts’ estimates of $2.20.
Naked Wines — Shares of Naked Wines leapt about 50% after hedge fund manager Glen Kacher revealed the company as a top pick on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” Thursday. Kacher has built a 9.9% stake in the wine distributor.

Merck — The drug maker jumped 6.1% after reporting its quarterly earnings. Merck brought in $1.75 per share, beating estimates by 20 cents, and topping revenue estimates thanks to stronger sales of vaccines and cancer drugs.
Anheuser-Busch — Shares of the beer brewer soared 9.4% after a surprise increase in third-quarter profit. The company also raised its earnings forecast for the year.
Northrop Grumman – Shares of the defense contractor dropped 7.6% after the the company’s third-quarter revenues came in at $8.72 billion, short the expected $8.95 billion, according to Refinitiv. The company saw year-over-year sales declines in its aeronautics and defense segments. Northrop did beat expectations for earnings per share.
Twilio — Shares of Twilio sunk 17.6% despite better-than-expected quarterly earnings results. Twilio earned 1 cent per share, better than the 15 cent loss per share expected, according to Refinitiv. Revenue also came in above estimates. However, Twilio forecast a wider-than-expected loss in the fourth quarter. COO George Hu also announced his departure.
Teradyne — Teradyne’s stock surged 11.3% after a better-than-expected earnings report. The equipment maker reported adjusted profit of $1.59 per share on revenue of $950.5 million. Analysts surveyed by StreetAccount expected earnings of $1.43 per share on revenue of $932.9 million. Teradyne also received upgrades from Cowen and UBS following the earnings report.
Tempur Sealy — The mattress company’s shares fell 3.6% despite reporting strong quarterly results. Tempur Sealy recorded earnings of 88 cents per share for the quarter, beating estimates by 3 cents. It also reported a revenue beat and a strong sales increase in international markets.
Teladoc Health — Shares of telehealth company popped 7.6% after reporting a smaller-than-expected earnings loss for the third quarter. Teladoc lost 53 cents per share, while analysts expected a loss of 65 cents per share, according to Refinitiv. The company made $522 million in revenue, topping estimates of $517 million.
ServiceNow — Shares of the software company rose 3.5% in midday trading after beating on the top and bottom lines of its quarterly results. ServiceNow reported earnings of $1.55 on revenue of $1.51 billion. Wall Street expected earnings of $1.38 per share on revenue of $1.48 billion, according to Refinitiv.
American Express — Shares of American Express dipped 6.7% after the company announced a new fully digital business checking account and its first ever business debit card.
— CNBC’s Tanaya Macheel, Maggie Fitzgerald, Yun Li and Jesse Pound contributed reporting

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“THIS REFORM will increase our energy security…and it will help us combat the threat posed by climate change.” Those hopeful words were uttered by Barack Obama, then America’s president, at the end of a meeting of the G20 group of countries in Pittsburgh in 2009. The gathered leaders had agreed to phase out subsidies for fossil fuels, which, by encouraging the use of polluting fuels, tilt the playing field against cleaner alternatives. Twelve years later, however, fossil-fuel subsidies are still hanging on. And as a severe energy-supply crunch leads to soaring prices around the world, they are making something of a comeback.Ministers from the European Union held an emergency meeting this week to discuss how to respond to the price spikes, but failed to agree on a plan. National politicians, however, are turning to subsidies and price caps. Italy is considering spending more than €5bn ($5.8bn, or 0.3% of GDP) this year and next to reduce the price of natural gas and power for consumers. France will extend its cap on household-gas prices until the end of next year.Most people would agree that fossil-fuel subsidies should, in principle, be ditched. But no politician wants to expose voters to pain at home or at the petrol pump. Even before the energy crisis, the politics of subsidies were veering off track. BloombergNEF, a research outfit, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, a charity, calculate that G20 countries offered direct subsidies on coal, oil, gas and fossil-fuel-fired power worth more than $3.3trn between 2015 and 2019. Tim Gould of the International Energy Agency, an official body, notes that periods of lower energy prices offer governments a chance to reduce subsidies. The fact that they did not use the pandemic-induced drop in energy demand and prices last year to roll back subsidies, he says, was “a missed opportunity”. In July G20 ministers could not even agree on a date by which fossil-fuel subsidies would be phased out.A new study from the IMF powerfully sets out both the scale of the subsidies and their impact. It estimates the effects of two types of support. Explicit subsidies, which include production-tax breaks for oil firms, create a wedge between the cost of supplying fuel and the price consumers pay at the pump. Yet governments are underpricing energy not only relative to supply costs, but also compared with social costs (such as the damage to health and the environment caused by fossil fuels). The researchers call this an implicit subsidy.They estimate that explicit subsidies will amount to just under $600bn this year (or 0.6% of global GDP) but that implicit subsidies could be ten times that (see chart 1). Even if the value of explicit support remains constant as a share of global output, the boffins reckon that the damage from fossil fuels, especially coal, will worsen, and that the value of implicit subsidies will continue to rise (see chart 2).If governments were to eliminate both explicit and implicit subsidies by 2025—admittedly, a huge if—then global emissions of carbon dioxide would fall by 36%, and global tax revenues would be higher by 3.8% of world GDP, compared with a scenario with no subsidy reform. Rather than a miserable world in which warming is 3°C above pre-industrial levels, the temperature rise would be kept “well below” 2°C and perhaps even on track towards 1.5°C, as the UN’s Paris climate accords intend. As the world’s leaders prepare to assemble in Glasgow for a climate summit, the hope is that these findings re-energise their efforts to tackle subsidy reform. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Perverse but persistent” More

IN FEBRUARY 2020 Americans on average spent 5% of their working hours at home. By May, as lockdowns spread, the share had soared to 60%—a trend that was mirrored in other countries. Many people, perhaps believing that working from home really meant shirking from home, assumed that office life would soon return to something like its pre-pandemic norm. To say it has not turned out that way would be a huge understatement.Most office workers remain steadfastly “remote-first”, spending most of their paid time out of the office. Even though a large share of people have little choice but to physically go to work, 40% of all American working hours are still now spent at home. In mid-October American offices were just over a third full, suggest data from Kastle Systems, a security firm. From Turin to Tokyo, commercial areas of cities remain substantially quieter, compared with pre-covid norms, than residential ones. Economists are trying to work out what all this means for productivity.Perceptions about the future of office work are changing. Last year British government ministers exhorted workers to get back to the office; now they are quieter. Wall Street banks, often the most enthusiastic advocates for in-office work, are toning down the rhetoric. According to a monthly survey by Jose Maria Barrero, Nick Bloom and Steven Davis, three economists, bosses expect that in a post-pandemic world an average of 1.3 days a week will be worked from home—a quarter more than they expected when asked the same question in January. Even that could in time prove to be an underestimate. Workers hope they will spend closer to half their working hours at the kitchen table.A few factors explain why remote-first work remains dominant. Many people remain scared of contracting covid-19, and thus wish to avoid public spaces. Another possibility is that workers have more bargaining power. In a world of labour shortages, it takes a brave boss to make people take a sweaty commute five days a week (workers view being forced to be in the office full-time as equivalent to a 5% pay cut). There is a more intriguing possibility, however. Work that is largely done remotely may be more efficient compared with an office-first model.The past year has seen an explosion of research on the economics of working from home. Not all the papers find a positive impact on productivity. A recent paper by Michael Gibbs of the University of Chicago and colleagues studies an Asian IT-services company. When the firm shifted to remote work last year average hours rose but output fell slightly. The authors ascribe part of the decline in productivity to “higher communication and co-ordination costs”. For instance, managers who had once popped their head round someone’s door may have found it harder to convey precisely what they needed when everyone was working remotely.Most studies, however, find more positive results. Mr Barrero and his colleagues’ surveys cover a large number of firms, rather than just one. Only 15% of home-workers believe they are less efficient working in this way than they were on business premises before the pandemic, according to a paper published by the team in April. A study released that month by Statistics Canada finds that more than half of “new” remote workers (ie, those who normally worked outside the home before the pandemic) reported completing about the same amount of work per hour as before, while one-third said they got more done.Economists have less insight into why remote workers might be more productive. One possibility is that they can more easily focus on tasks than in an office, where the temptation to gossip with a co-worker looms large. Commuting, moreover, is tiring. Another factor relates to technology. Remote workers, by necessity, rely more on tools such as Slack and Microsoft Teams. This may allow bosses to co-ordinate teams more effectively, if the alternative in the office was word-of-mouth instructions that could easily be forgotten or misinterpreted. Patent applications for work-from-home technologies are soaring, while American private-sector investment in IT is growing by 14% year-on-year.Yet the popularity of remote-first work presents a puzzle. If it is so wonderful, then why is there little evidence of a shift towards “fully remote” work, where firms shut down their offices altogether? Companies that have chosen to do this are in a tiny minority. The number of people moving to cities such as Tulsa, in Oklahoma, which is positioning itself as the global capital of remote work, remains small.Perhaps it is only a matter of time before everyone who can goes fully remote. A new study in Nature Human Behaviour, however,suggests that firms have good reason to hold on to their office buildings, even if they are used less frequently. The paper studies the communications (including instant messages and video calls) of 60,000 Microsoft employees in 2019-20. Remote work makes people’s collaboration practices more “static and siloed”, it finds. People interact more with their closest contacts, but less with the more marginal members of their networks who can offer them new perspectives and ideas. That probably hurts innovation. The upshot is that fully remote teams might do quite well in the short term, but will ultimately suffer as innovation dries up.What a way to make a livingHow best to collaborate, then, in a remote-first world? Many firms assume it is enough for everyone to come into the office a few days a week, since this will lead to people bumping into each other and talking about ideas. Others, backed by stronger evidence, say that managers must be more intentional, and bring people together with the express purpose of discussing new ideas. Firms will have to experiment as they get used to a new way of working, and the precise arrangement may vary depending on the type of work. What seems clear, though, is that offices will still have a role after the pandemic—even if they are mostly empty. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The pyjama revolution” More

FOREIGN-EXCHANGE markets were once a hotbed of lively, speculative activity. But today traders seeking an adrenalin fix must turn to assets like cryptocurrencies instead. Barring a brief surge early in the pandemic—and isolated goings-on in the Turkish lira—currency markets have gone quiet. Macro-trading funds no longer strike fear into central bankers and finance ministries with speculative attacks. The last sudden end to a major currency peg—that of the Swiss franc in 2015—was a result of the central bank taking investors by surprise, rather than the other way round.Rock-bottom inflation and interest rates over the past decade helped smother swings in exchange rates. Deutsche Bank’s CVIX index, a gauge of forex volatility, has been above its current level more than 90% of the time over the past 20 years. By contrast, the VIX, which measures expected volatility for America’s S&P 500 index of stocks and is often used as a measure of overall market sentiment, has so far spent October at roughly its long-term average. But as consumer prices and interest rates go up, currency volatility could well stage a return, with potentially unwelcome consequences for some investors.The strangeness of the recovery from the pandemic makes predicting the path of policy especially hard. Yet some divergences seem likely to reassert themselves. Countries are recovering at different speeds, and central banks are displaying varying levels of discomfort with inflation. Policy in America is especially important, given the pivotal role of the dollar: 88% of over-the-counter foreign-exchange trades in 2019 involved the greenback, according to the Bank for International Settlements. The chances that the Federal Reserve turns more rapidly to policy tightening are rising. Break-evens (the gap between yields on inflation-protected Treasury bonds and conventional ones of the same maturity) point to annual inflation of around 3% over the next five years, the highest reading since at least 2003. By contrast, no one is expecting interest-rate rises for decades in Japan, where year-on-year inflation, excluding food and energy, is negative.Long periods of low volatility are understandably regarded as a good thing by most investors. But they can have less desirable side-effects. Hyman Minsky, an economist, suggested that periods of financial stability and sustained profits can change the behaviour of market participants, by pushing them to adopt riskier strategies that could in turn destabilise markets. The danger is that, as currency markets return to life, the shortcomings of these sorts of strategies are exposed.The boom in Asian economies in the 1990s, which led to enormous unhedged dollar borrowing by governments and firms, is a case study in how the perception of safety, once overturned, can cause violent market reactions. Faced with steep currency depreciation in 1997-98, that borrowing proved impossible to service, spurring defaults and bail-outs. Today emerging-market governments issue far more of their debt in their own currencies, and when they borrow in foreign currency, do so at longer maturities. Still, weak spots remain. Dollar borrowing by non-banks in the developing world has almost doubled to over $4trn in the past decade, much of it reflecting bond issuance by companies, rather than governments.Creditors, too, are vulnerable to exchange-rate risk. Working out the extent to which asset-owners hedge their exposures is tricky. But the available figures indicate that falling volatility tends to cause companies to reduce hedging. Large Japanese insurers have tended to hedge more over the past two decades whenever volatility has risen, suggests Fed research published last year. Insurers bought far more currency forwards and swaps during and immediately after the global financial crisis, when volatility peaked, and a declining share relative to their foreign assets thereafter. Unhedged net foreign assets in Australia, too, have risen in the past couple of decades, in part reflecting the rise of non-bank borrowers that are unprotected.An optimist might point to the market stress of the early days of the pandemic, when volatility surged without causing big currency-market blow-ups. If the system was able to weather acute distress then, why worry now? But placidity was restored in short order last year because central banks were unusually co-ordinated in their easing. Now, by contrast, they are preparing to go their separate ways. Currency markets may no longer be an oasis of calm.For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “Back with a vengeance” More

ON THE FACE of things, it seems both absurd and unfair that large American companies regularly whittle down their tax bills, taking advantage of every loophole on offer. One study found that at least 55 big companies incurred no federal taxes at all on their profits in 2020. A proposal being discussed as The Economist went to press, and as the Democratic Party scrambled to fund its social-spending package, seems to offer a popular solution: a minimum tax on corporate earnings as reported to shareholders, rather than as massaged down when reported to tax collectors.The structure of the minimum tax looks simple enough. Companies that report more than $1bn in profits to shareholders would pay a tax of at least 15% on those profits. The levy would be explicitly aimed at firms such as Amazon, which had an effective federal income-tax rate of just 4.3% from 2018 to 2020, far below the statutory rate of 21%, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, a left-leaning think-tank. All told, the new tax would apply to some 200 big companies.Politically, the minimum corporate tax has much going for it. Angus King, an independent senator who is an architect of the proposal, believes it could raise $400bn over ten years. That would help fund the bill that is the cornerstone of President Joe Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, featuring about $2trn in spending over the next decade (equivalent to less than 1% of projected GDP during that time). The corporate minimum is also less controversial than another new levy the Democrats were rowing over, a tax on unrealised capital gains that would target 700 billionaires.Democrats had hoped at first to rely on a general increase in the corporate-tax rate to raise revenues. But Kyrsten Sinema, a Democratic senator from Arizona whose support is needed for the bill to pass, opposed the wider increase and has instead backed the minimum tax as “commonsense”. The idea also has the approval of Joe Manchin, a Democratic senator from West Virginia, whose vote could prove decisive.The economic rationale is, however, more dubious. Despite its apparently simple structure, it would introduce more complexity into an already bloated tax code. Companies would face two parallel systems, calculating their liabilities first under regular tax rules and then under the minimum-tax regime. An earlier version of a minimum corporate tax, repealed under President Donald Trump in 2017, was so onerous that in some years compliance costs outstripped tax collections.The gap between taxable income and book income as reported to shareholders exists for a reason. When, say, a company builds a factory, financial rules require it to spread the cost over many years based on depreciation, letting investors know the value of its assets. Tax rules, however, let firms report costs when incurred. That lowers tax bills when investments are made and encourages more spending.Calculating minimum taxes based on book, rather than taxable, income would lead to two perverse outcomes. First, powers over tax would, in effect, be granted to the Financial Accounting Standards Board, an unelected body that governs how companies report income. Changes in its standards would lead to changes in taxation.Second, companies would have less scope for deducting investment expenses, and hence might pare back capital spending. Mr Biden, though, does not want that to happen, so the proposal maintains several deductions, including for spending on clean energy and on research and development—one of the provisions that may have allowed Amazon to lower its taxes.Companies, for their part, will adapt. By turning more to debt instead of equity markets for financing, for instance, they could increase their interest expenses, which would eat into both their book and taxable incomes. The upshot is that the minimum corporate tax may end up raising far less revenue than its proponents believe, while also skewing investment incentives—and making a messy tax code even more complicated. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “A tale of two profits” More

IF SUN YAT-SEN had got his way, China would have been a bold pioneer in the taxation of real estate. During his exile in Europe from 1896 to 1898, the republican revolutionary fell under the spell of Henry George, an influential American journalist who believed a single tax on land should replace all others. Sun hoped pre-industrial China could adopt such innovations more easily than the West, because it was “unimpeded by the opposition of entrenched capital”, as one scholar put it.Instead China has become a timid procrastinator in the taxation of real estate, particularly of the property built on top of land, as opposed to the land itself. It first proposed a recurring tax on the value of property in 2003. And it introduced a half-baked pilot scheme in the cities of Shanghai and Chongqing in 2011. The tax was included in the five-year legislative plan of the National People’s Congress (NPC), China’s rubber-stamp parliament, in 2015. But things went no further. Reform, it seems, was impeded by the opposition of entrenched interests, including no doubt many officials who would prefer not to declare their properties, let alone pay taxes on them.But in August Xi Jinping, China’s president, expressed support for a property tax as part of his campaign to curb excessive wealth and promote “common prosperity”. And on October 23rd the NPC said pilot schemes would be expanded to new cities (although it did not say when or which).Such a tax is sorely needed. China raises little money from its personal-income taxes, which are too easily avoided. Indirect levies, such as the value-added tax, are more lucrative but regressive. Local governments in particular lack a stable source of revenue, which leaves them heavily reliant on land sales and transfers from the central government. Although China does impose a variety of property-related taxes (including one on the purchase of land), these levies fall more heavily on the construction and trading of real estate than on the possession of it. As China’s property market matures, and its economy moves beyond breakneck urban expansion, housebuilding and selling will provide fewer feathers to pluck.The tax could also ameliorate some of the perversities of China’s economic model. About a fifth of its urban housing stood vacant in 2017, according to the China Household Finance Survey, led by Li Gan of Texas A&M University. A property tax would make it more costly to buy second or third homes and keep them empty, in the hope of selling them on for a higher price. It could therefore discourage speculation and invigorate China’s underdeveloped rental market.But a property tax will also be unpopular. It is the tax “everyone loves to hate”, as Jay Rosengard of Harvard University has put it. Such taxes are not discreetly withheld from a paycheque or embedded in a product’s price. Payments can be lumpy, conspicuous and irksome, especially if the taxpayer doubts that bureaucrats will spend the money well. As property prices have raced ahead of incomes, many homeowners may also be “asset-rich” but relatively “cash-poor”. In 2019, for example, a property tax of 1.2% would have eaten up over 10% of the average urban resident’s disposable income.Some people also fear that the tax will crash the market. That seems unlikely. It will be some time before any revenue is actually collected. And the tax is not the only lever that policymakers can pull. China’s cities impose a variety of other impediments and deterrents to property purchases, including hefty downpayment requirements, limits on the purchase of additional flats, and rules that oblige buyers to show a history of local social-security contributions. If a property tax were to weigh too heavily on the market, these prudential limits could be eased.The bigger danger is that the tax will do too little, not too much, to cool speculation. The Chongqing tax, which is levied chiefly on detached and high-end properties and exempts the first 100 square metres of space, depressed prices by 2.5% a year, relative to where they would have been, according to a study in 2015 by Zaichao Du and Lin Zhang of Southwestern University of Finance and Economics in Chengdu. But prices still rose on average. Shanghai’s tax had no effect on prices at all.Progress and procrastinationTo make them more palatable, the Chongqing and Shanghai pilot taxes were both patchy and complicated. The new pilot cities should try cleaner designs. Any flaws, kinks or ill-judged exemptions can be difficult to fix later. Indonesia, Mr Rosengard has pointed out, decided to keep its effective property tax at a meagre 0.1% while it collected better data on property ownership and values. Yet even after the data improved, it found it difficult to raise the rate. Britain’s property tax in the 1980s was based on increasingly anachronistic rental values. But the government was so reluctant to update them that it introduced a disastrous “poll” tax instead. Ontario in Canada spent 30 years talking about reforming its property tax, before eventually taking the plunge in 1998, as detailed by Richard Bird and Enid Slack of the University of Toronto.Sun Yat-sen hoped that China’s late start in economic modernisation would help it avoid some of the mistakes of the countries that went before it. China’s later start in property taxation gives it plenty more examples to avoid. ■For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in economics, business and markets, sign up to Money Talks, our weekly newsletter.This article appeared in the Finance & economics section of the print edition under the headline “The long wait for a tax everyone loves to hate” More

Alchemy announced a $250 million funding round Thursday, marking a sevenfold increase in valuation since April.
The San Francisco-based start-up lets developers build applications on top of blockchains such as Ethereum.
Adobe announced it would begin offering NFTs through a Photoshop feature and is working with Alchemy.

Alchemy co-founders Nikil Viswanathan (left) and Joe Lau.
Source: Alchemy

Start-up Alchemy is benefiting as more companies try to future-proof their businesses by adapting their technologies to the blockchain and through digital collectibles.
The San Francisco-based company announced a $250 million funding round on Thursday, boosting its valuation to $3.5 billion. The Series C financing, led by Andreessen Horowitz, marks a sevenfold increase in Alchemy’s valuation from April.

Alchemy acts as a middleman between blockchain, the technology made famous by bitcoin, and apps that consumers might use on their phones. Its platform lets developers build applications on top of blockchains such as Ethereum.
Those behind-the-scenes building blocks have been used to create Dapper Labs, the maker of CryptoKitties, NBA Top Shot, video game Axie Infinity and OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace. A record-breaking $69 million nonfungible token sold by digital artist Beeple was also powered by Alchemy.
Nonfungible tokens, also called NFTs, represent ownership of a virtual item such as a piece of digital artwork or a sports trading card. This week, Adobe, which is working with Alchemy, announced plans to let artists prepare NFTs in Photoshop. PwC also has a partnership with the start-up.
“The big driver for tech companies is trying to future-proof their products, and making sure that they’re up to date on emerging technologies,” Joe Lau, Alchemy’s co-founder and chief technology officer, told CNBC. “They’re young enough that they remember what it was like to see a new technology come up — they want to make sure they’re on top of it.”
Its investors liken Alchemy to Amazon Web Services, which sits between the internet and companies like Netflix and Uber that use AWS to host their websites. Alchemy is also being used to build applications like video games and social networks in what some describe as “web 3.0.”

“The biggest misconception about blockchains is that they are just about money, cryptocurrencies, or finance,” said Ali Yahya, a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz who led the funding round. “The truth is that they’re actually much more powerful and allow for a much broader set of applications.”
Alchemy has seen 15 times revenue growth since April, and as of late October was profitable, according to its founders. The start-up has been around for four years, but just made its public launch last August. Former Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang, Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman, Jay-Z and Charles Schwab (the founder, not the brokerage firm), are among its early investors. The former CEO of the New York Stock Exchange, Coinbase and PayPal founder Peter Thiel are also backers, and so is the chairman of Alphabet, John Hennessy.
Celebrities, musicians and professional athletes have brought more attention to the NFT space this year. The frenzy smacks of what marked a top for cryptocurrency markets around 2018, with the rise of the initial coin offering, or ICO.
Alchemy co-founder and CEO Nikil Viswanathan compared it to the early days of the internet. “A lot of companies died but that didn’t mean that the internet wasn’t valuable,” he said.
“Similarly, we think NFTs are here to stay,” Viswanathan told CNBC. “Blockchain has matured to a place where major companies like Adobe, that are driving the tech ecosystem today, are finding value in it.”

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Check out the companies making headlines before the bell:
Comcast (CMCSA) – The parent of NBCUniversal and CNBC reported adjusted quarterly earnings of 87 cents per share, 12 cents above estimates. Revenue also beat forecasts as cable and broadband revenue grew, and the stock jumped 3% in the premarket.

Caterpillar (CAT) – Caterpillar shares rose 2.5% in the premarket after the heavy equipment maker beat bottom-line estimates for the third quarter despite a slight revenue shortfall. Adjusted earnings came to $2.66 per share compared with a consensus estimate of $2.20, amid elevated demand in the construction industry.
Merck (MRK) – The drugmaker beat estimates by 20 cents with adjusted quarterly earnings of $1.75 per share, with revenue also topping estimates on stronger sales of vaccines and cancer drugs. Merck rose 2.2% in premarket trading.
Tempur Sealy (TPX) – Shares of the mattress company added 2.5% in the premarket after it reported an adjusted quarterly profit of 88 cents per share, 3 cents above estimates. Revenue was also above analyst forecasts, with a particularly strong sales increase in international markets.
Ford (F) – Ford surged 9.5% in premarket trading, after it earned an adjusted 51 cents per share for the third quarter, well above the 27-cent consensus estimate. Ford also increased its full-year guidance amid strong demand, despite inventory being crimped by the worldwide chip shortage. The automaker said supply chain constraints should slowly ease this quarter and throughout 2022.
eBay (EBAY) – eBay beat estimates by 1 cent with an adjusted quarterly profit of 90 cents per share, and the online marketplace operator’s revenue also topped forecasts. However, the stock slid 5.1% in premarket action as eBay issued weaker than expected current quarter guidance.

ServiceNow (NOW) – ServiceNow came in 17 cents ahead of estimates with adjusted quarterly earnings of $1.55 per share and revenue beating analyst projects as well. The provider of human resources services gave guidance that was merely in line with forecasts, contributing to a 2.5% premarket decline in the share price.
WPP Group (WPP) – WPP easily beat forecasts with its third-quarter results, and the advertising agency operator also raised its sales guidance as companies seek to take advantage of strong consumer spending with new ad campaigns. WPP rallied 7.4% in the premarket.
Anheuser-Busch InBev (BUD) – The company reported a surprise increase in quarterly profit, and the beer brewer also raised its 2021 earnings forecast. AB InBev is getting a boost from stronger beer sales, particularly in Brazil, and its shares soared 10.2% in the premarket.
Align Technology (ALGN) – Align surged 8.4% in premarket trading after it beat estimates by 27 cents with adjusted quarterly earnings of $2.87 per share. The maker of the Invisalign invisible dental brace system also reported better-than-expected revenue.
Sleep Number (SNBR) – Sleep Number earned $2.22 per share for its latest quarter, well above the $1.44 consensus estimate, with revenue easily beating forecasts. The mattress maker also issued a slightly better than expected full-year earnings outlook, and its shares surged 7.8% in the premarket.

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