All three major U.S. stock market indices rose for a second consecutive day on Tuesday as a big earnings week began to unfold.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 475 points, or 1.6%, to finish at 30,687.
World’s richest man to retire as CEO. One of the two Big Tech stocks headlining earnings season on Tuesday was Amazon (ticker: AMZN), which reported comfortable beats on both earnings and revenue in the holiday quarter.
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But the afternoon announcement also brought news that founder and CEO Jeff Bezos will be stepping down from his role as CEO in the third quarter, ceding the top spot at the company to the current head of its cloud-computing division Amazon Web Services, Andy Jassy.
The decently long transition period seems to be reassuring investors, as the stock was little-changed in after-hours trading Tuesday. Bezos will transition to executive chairman on the Amazon board, so his fingerprints will still be all over Amazon in the years ahead.
Silver short-squeeze being disputed by WSB. Initially attributed to activity on the Reddit thread WallStreetBets, the wild fluctuation of silver prices in recent days has less to do with the internet forum and more to do with other market dynamics.
Silver prices, which had roared to their highest levels since 2013 on Monday, shed about 9% on Tuesday.
Reddit stocks plunge. GameStop ( GME), AMC Entertainment ( AMC) and other poorly run companies that have been central players in the Reddit-versus-Wall Street narrative got clobbered on Tuesday. It looks like the highest stock prices for these troubled companies are likely in the rearview mirror now, as traders rapidly abandon these flash-in-a-pan names.
GME stock plunged 60% and AMC shares fell 41.3% on Tuesday.
Ethereum all-time high. The second-leading cryptocurrency, Ethereum, rose to all-time highs of more than $1,540 on Tuesday. The recent controversy surrounding stocks like GameStop, which faced trading restrictions on some popular brokerages, has driven more interest in ideas like decentralized finance, where Ethereum is the premier player.
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Bezos Stepping Down as Amazon CEO originally appeared on usnews.com
