Alibaba shares got a boost last week from news founder Jack Ma is pleased with the company’s turnaround so far. That’s after co-founder and current Chair Joe Tsai told CNBC in late February he felt a lot more “confident” about Alibaba’s ability to still be a top e-commerce player. Ma stepped down as chairman in 2019 . Wall Street analysts expect business will grow, but last week several trimmed their price targets on the stock. Their shared concern is how much Alibaba is spending in the near term for future growth. JPMorgan lowered its earnings forecasts based on “Alibaba’s increasing commitment to investments in core operations: domestic/international ecommerce and cloud,” China Internet Analyst Alex Yao and a team said in a report on April 9. They cut their price target to $100 a share, down from $105 previously, while maintaining an overweight rating. The new price target is still about 33% above where Alibaba’s U.S.-listed shares closed Thursday. The stock has tumbled over a rocky period of about 12 months in which the company shook up its management with a restructuring into six units aimed at spin-offs — “to unlock shareholder value.” One by one, the company has cancelled plans for the IPO of its cloud business, and then its logistics arm Cainiao . “The first thing we did was to acknowledge mistakes,” Tsai told Norges Bank Investment Management’s CEO Nicolai Tangen in an interview, according to a video published on April 3. The firm says it owns 2% of Alibaba. “We’ve acknowledged in the past we might have not focused on our [shopping app] user experience,” Tsai said. “The second thing is to reorganize our personnel, change the organizational structure that fits the strategy.” Eddie Wu became CEO of Alibaba in September, and is also acting head of the cloud business. He succeeded Trudy Dai as head of the Taobao and Tmall e-commerce business in December. Daniel Zhang, the former CEO of the company, abruptly left instead of staying on to lead cloud as originally planned. “Near term, BABA’s financial metrics should remain weak over the next few quarters, given its sustained user investment in Taobao Tmall and [Alibaba International Digital Commerce] investment,” UBS analyst Kenneth Fong and a team said in a report on April 9. “More meaningful upside is likely to be in 2H if macro recovery builds momentum and with more concrete financial results demonstrated from the new business strategy,” UBS said. They cut their price target by $1 to $105 a share and maintained their buy rating. Competition remains fierce across Alibaba’s major business lines. PDD Holdings’ Pinduoduo app and ByteDance’s Douyin, the local version of TikTok, have emerged as two major competitors to Alibaba in e-commerce. The company had spearheaded the industry’s rapid growth in China with its Taobao and Tmall platforms. In the relatively new realm of generative artificial intelligence, ByteDance Doubao chatbot is more popular than Alibaba’s, according to Nomura, citing Questmobile data. Doubao had around 3.7 million users as of the end of March, more than twice that of Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen AI chatbot, the data showed. Baidu’s Ernie bot was in second place, with around 2.5 million daily active users. By average daily time spent, Doubao remains first at 8.4 minutes, but Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen is second at 7.7 minutes as of the end of March, according to the data. Alibaba is also integrating AI tools and models with its e-commerce and cloud businesses. However, in Tsai’s interview with Norges Bank Investment Management, the Alibaba executive said he estimated that China was about two years behind the U.S. in terms of AI development. AI monetization also got little to no mention in six analyst reports published last week on Alibaba. “We maintain our conservative view towards BABA as business transformation is likely to take time,” Morgan Stanley equity analyst Gary Yu and a team said in a note on April 10. They have a price target of $85, and, in contrast to the many buy ratings, rate the stock equal weight. — CNBC’s Michael Bloom and Arjun Kharpal contributed to this report.
Steve Cohen said Wednesday he sees the possibility that stocks could retest their lows from April following the market’s dramatic comeback. “I don’t expect, you know, a significant decline. I think this is possible we can go back toward the lows which is 10%, 15% [from here] so it’s not a calamity,” the founder of Point72 said at the Sohn Investment Conference in New York. “What Trump did recently actually raises the floor and eliminates perhaps the dire scenario.” Cohen’s comments came after the U.S. and China suspended reciprocal tariffs pending a 90-day negotiating period, which sparked a sharp rally in stocks. The S & P 500 has jumped 4% this week, fully recovering from the April sell-off and turning green on the year. Stocks started to mount their comeback from their tariffs lows last month as Trump paused the most severe tariffs on most countries. .SPX YTD mountain S & P 500 The billionaire investor, also owner of the New York Mets of Major League Baseball, said the market feels “toppy” right now. He believes there is still a modest risk the U.S. could tip into a recession even though tariffs on China have been slashed. “We’re not a recession yet…. We think it would probably be like a 45% chance of recession,” Cohen said. “So that’s not insignificant, even if it’s not the definition of recession, it’s definitely slow growth. And so I think it’s almost unavoidable when you add up the tariffs, you add up the 10% rate, sectorial tariffs, and whatever happens with China.”
“I didn’t really start getting old, for some strange reason, until I was about 90,” he told the Journal in a phone interview. “But when you start getting old, it does become—it’s irreversible.”
The Oracle of Omaha, who turns 95 in August, revealed to the paper that he started to lose his balance occasionally, while experiencing issues remembering someone’s name sometimes. His vision also turned less clear when reading newspapers.
It marked an end of an era at Berkshire, which was a failing New England textile mill six decades ago and was transformed into a one-of-a-kind conglomerate with businesses ranging from Geico insurance to BNSF Railway. Buffett is handing over his reins on a high note as Berkshire shares are near a record high, giving the conglomerate a market cap of nearly $1.2 trillion.
Berkshire’s board voted unanimously to make Greg Abel, now vice chairman of noninsurance operations, president and CEO on Jan. 1, 2026, and for Buffett to remain as chairman.
Still, Buffett said he remains mentally sharp to make investment decisions when opportunities arise. The value investing icon is known to take advantage of market turmoil and depressed prices to make big purchases.
“I don’t have any trouble making decisions about something that I was making decisions on 20 years ago or 40 years ago or 60 years,” he told the Journal. “I will be useful here if there’s a panic in the market because I don’t get fearful when things go down in price or everybody else gets scared….And that really isn’t a function of age.”
The logo for consumer lending firm Capital One Financial Corp is seen on its headquarters on January 20, 2023 in McLean, Virginia. The company has reportedly eliminated up to 1,100 technology positions this week as its digital structure matures.
Win Mcnamee | Getty Images News | Getty Images
New York Attorney General Letitia James sued Capital One on Wednesday, accusing the bank of “cheating” customers out of millions of dollars in interest payments – just months after the Trump administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dropped a similar suit against the financial institution.
In a complaint filed in Manhattan federal court, James alleged that Capital One marketed its “360 Savings” account as its high-yield savings account, then left those customers in the dark by failing to inform them about its new “360 Performance Savings” product that offered substantially higher interest rates.
As interest rates rose starting in 2022, the state attorney general’s office said, Capital One froze the interest rate of its 360 Savings product at 0.3%, while increasing the rate of the 360 Performance Savings accounts to as high as 4.35%, meaning New York 360 Savings customers lost out on “millions of dollars of interest.”
The suit further alleges that Capital One instructed its employees not to tell 360 Savings customers about the new product “unless they explicitly asked.”
The complaint mimics litigation by the CFPB, which was dropped in February under Trump-era CFPB Acting Director Russell Vought. That suit alleged Capital One’s marketing led U.S. customers to miss out on more than $2 billion in interest.
The dropped CFPB case is among a slew of other enforcement lawsuits that the agency pursued under previous CFPB director, Rohit Chopra, and that have been dismissed by President Donald Trump’s administration.
“Capital One assured high returns with no catches, then pulled the rug out from under their customers and hoped nobody would notice,” James said in a statement Wednesday. “Big banks are not allowed to cheat their customers with false advertising and misleading promises.”
Capital One did not immediately respond to CNBC’s request for comment Wednesday. The bank disputed the CFPB allegations earlier this year and told CNBC that it transparently marketed its 360 Performance Savings account.
The New York suit accuses Capital One of violating state and federal law and seeks “restitution and damages for all affected Capital One customers.”