Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading. Duolingo — The online language app company popped 5.3% after JPMorgan reiterated its overweight rating on the stock , saying it has an attractive risk/reward and potential upside for its first-quarter guide and 2024 outlook. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing — U.S.-traded shares of the Taiwanese chipmaker dropped 4.9% after the company noted that, although it did not experience structural damage, some wafers “had to be scrapped” after the earthquake in Taiwan earlier in April. Most of the lost production will be recovered in the second quarter, according to management. The company still beat revenue and profit expectations in the first quarter and forecasted healthy growth in 2024. JetBlue Airways — Shares jumped 4.1% after JPMorgan upgraded the airline to neutral from underperform, saying it likes its turnaround potential. Bitcoin miners – Shares of bitcoin mining companies rallied ahead of the widely anticipated “halving,” which cuts miners’ main stream of revenue in half , as mandated by the Bitcoin code. Marathon Digital rose 2.7%, while Riot Platforms and Iris Energy gained 4%. CleanSpark , which is one of the only miners still up for the year, rallied 8.8%. Estee Lauder — Deutsche Bank added a short-term buy rating on the cosmetics giant, sending shares 4.9% higher. The firm positively views the setup into Estee Lauder’s earnings, which are due May 1. Meta Platforms — The tech giant advanced 1.5% after striking a partnership with Google to include its search results in its new AI assistant, Meta Llama 3. Tesla — The electric vehicle manufacturer slid 3.6%, hitting its 52-week low, after Deutsche Bank analyst Emmanuel Rosner downgraded Tesla stock to hold from buy. Rosner pointed to a report from Reuters that said Tesla had canceled plans to build its inexpensive Model 2 car, which he said creates the risk of no new vehicle in Tesla’s consumer lineup for the foreseeable future and would put continued downward pressure on the company’s volume and pricing for many more years, lowering earnings. Barnes Group — The global industrial tech and aerospace stock jumped 9.3% after DA Davidson upgraded the company to buy from neutral, saying shares are attractive. Alaska Air Group — Shares of the airline jumped nearly 8.1% on better-than-expected first-quarter results. Alaska Air’s loss per share of 92 cents ex-items was lower than an LSEG estimate of $1.05 per share. Revenue came in at $2.23 billion, beating analysts’ forecasts of $2.19 billion. Blackstone — The asset manager slipped 2.3% after lowering its dividend to 83 cents per share from 94 cents per share. Earnings in the first quarter came in at 98 cents per share, slightly higher than the LSEG consensus estimate of 96 cents per share. BJ’s Wholesale Club — Loop Capital downgraded BJ’s on valuation, sending the stock 3.6% lower. The firm lowered its estimates on the warehouse store company for merchandise same-store sales and gross margin. D.R. Horton — Shares added 0.1% after D.R. Horton exceeded expectations in its fiscal second quarter, posting earnings of $3.52 per share on revenue of $9.11 billion. Analysts polled by LSEG, meanwhile, expected the homebuilder to post earnings of $3.06 per share on revenue of $8.27 billion. eBay — The e-commerce stock rose 1% following a double upgrade at Morgan Stanley to overweight from underweight. The firm said eBay seems undervalued relative to its peer Etsy. Elevance Health — Shares jumped 3.2% after the health insurance company posted an earnings beat and raised its full-year guidance. Elevance’s revenue came out slightly below estimates, however. Zoom Video Communications — Rosenblatt Securities upgraded shares of the video conferencing company to buy from neutral, saying it is optimistic on Zoom’s “refocused” channel strategy and its healthy balance sheet. The stock rose 1.5% on the new rating. Trump Media & Technology Group — Shares of former President Donald Trump’s media firm and Truth Social parent company climbed 25.7%, adding to gains from a day earlier . Earlier in the week, the company announced plans to launch a TV streaming arm of Truth Social which sent shares lower. — CNBC’s Samantha Subin, Brian Evans, Hakyung Kim and Lisa Kailai Han contributed reporting.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent speaks to reporters outside the West Wing after doing a television interview on the North Lawn of the White House on March 13, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Andrew Harnik | Getty Images
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Wednesday the sell-off in the stock market is due more to a sharp pullback in the biggest technology stocks instead of the protectionist policies coming from the Trump administration.
“I’m trying to be Secretary of Treasury, not a market commentator. What I would point out is that especially the Nasdaq peaked on DeepSeek day so that’s a Mag 7 problem, not a MAGA problem,” Bessent said on Bloomberg TV Wednesday evening.
Bessent was referring to Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, whose new language models sparked a rout in U.S. technology stocks in late January. The emergence of DeepSeek’s highly competitive and potentially much cheaper models stoked doubts about the billions that the big U.S. tech companies are spending on AI.
The so-called Magnificent 7 stocks — Apple, Amazon, Tesla, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia — started selling off drastically, pulling the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite into correction territory. The tech-heavy benchmark is down about 13% from its record high reached on December 16.
However, the secretary downplayed the impact from President Donald Trump’s steep tariffs, which caught many investors off guard and fueled fears of a re-acceleration in inflation, slower economic growth and even a recession. Many investors have blamed the tariff rollout for driving the S&P 500 briefly into correction territory from its record reached in late February. Wall Street defines a correction as a drop of 10% from a recent high.
S&P 500, YTD
Trump signed an aggressive “reciprocal tariff” policy at the White House Wednesday evening, slapping duties of at least 10% and even higher for some countries. The actions sparked a huge sell-off in the stock market overnight, with the S&P 500 futures declining nearly 4% and the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average shedding 1,100 points. The losses will likely but the S&P 500 back into correction territory in Thursday’s session.
“It’s going to be fine if we put the best economic conditions in place,” Bessent said in a separate interview on Fox Wednesday evening. “If you go back and look, the stock market actually peaked on the [DeepSeek] Chinese AI announcement. So a lot of what we have seen has been just an idiosyncratic tech sell-off.”
A Newsmax booth broadcasts as attendees try out the guns on display at the National Rifle Association (NRA) annual convention in Houston, Texas, U.S. May 29, 2022.
Callaghan O’hare | Reuters
Shares of conservative news channel Newsmax plunged more than 70% on Wednesday as its meteoric rise as a new public company proved to be short-lived.
The stock tumbled a whopping 72% in afternoon trading, following a 2,230% surge in Newsmax’s first two days of trading after debuting on the New York Stock Exchange. At one point, the rally gave the company a market capitalization of nearly $30 billion — surpassing the market cap of legacy media companies like Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox Corp.
Newsmax was listed on the NYSE via a so-called Regulation A offering, instead of a traditional IPO. Such an offering allows small companies to raise capital without undergoing the full SEC registration process. The primary focus is to sell to retail investors, in this case It was sold to approximately 30,000 retail investors.
The public offering indeed garnered the attention from retail traders, some of whom touted the stock as the “New GME” in online chatrooms. GME refers to the meme stock GameStop, which made Wall Street history in 2021 by its speculative trading boom.
Newsmax has a small “float,” or shares available for trading. Less than 6% of Newsmax shares, or 7.5 million shares out of a total of 128 million fully diluted shares, are available for public trading.
The conservative TV news outlet has seen its ratings rise with the election of President Donald Trump and other prominent Republicans — although it still falls behind the dominant Fox News. Overall, Newsmax ranks in the top 20 among cable network average viewership in both prime time and daytime, Nielsen said.
Check out the companies making headlines in midday trading. Tesla – Shares jumped more than 5%. Politico , citing three Trump insiders, reported President Donald Trump told members of his inner circle that Tesla CEO Elon Musk could leave his current role in the coming weeks. Amazon – Shares of the e-commerce and cloud giant popped more than 2%. The New York Times , citing three people familiar, reported that Amazon has put in a bid to acquire TikTok. The video app is staring down an April 5 deadline to part with its Chinese owner or face a ban in the U.S. Rivian Automotive – Shares of the electric vehicle maker slid more than 5%. Rivian said that it delivered 8,640 vehicles for the first quarter , marking a 36% drop in deliveries compared to a year ago. However, that figure exceeded the consensus estimate of 8,200, per Visible Alpha. nCino – The cloud banking firm’s stock pulled back more than 20% after nCino reported weaker-than-expected fourth-quarter earnings and soft guidance for the first quarter and full year. For the fourth quarter, nCino posted adjusted earnings of 12 cents per share, below the 19 cents per share that analysts polled by FactSet were expecting. The stock tumbled more than 30% in the premarket, which KBW said was ” overdone .” BlackBerry – The software and communications stock tumbled 6%. BlackBerry guided for fiscal first-quarter revenue of between $107 million to $115 million, lower than the $124.6 million analysts had expected, per FactSet. However, both BlackBerry’s fourth-quarter adjusted earnings and revenue exceeded consensus estimates. Newsmax – The stock sank more than 45%, giving up some of the big gains it reaped following its debut on the New York Stock Exchange Monday. The conservative cable news network surged 179% in the previous session and 700% on its first official trading day. Trump Media & Technology Group – Shares dropped 5% after Trump Media in a securities filing disclosed the possibility of a significant stock sale , including by insider shareholders such as the president’s trust. Petco – Shares of the pet goods retailer soared about 15% after CEO Joel Anderson purchased almost 1.6 million shares, according to a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. CoreWeave – The stock rose more than 8%, extending its recent gains. On Tuesday, shares of the Nvidia-backed cloud computing company climbed nearly 42% . The recent advances follow a rocky debut for CoreWeave late last week. Nvidia – The chipmaker added roughly 1% ahead of the April 2 tariff announcement. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently downplayed any negative impact from U.S. tariffs. The company’s chips are mostly made in Taiwan, but some of its systems are manufactured in other countries, such as Mexico and the U.S. Scotts Miracle-Gro – The lawn care stock jumped nearly 5% on the heels of Truist’s upgrade to buy from hold . Truist said the stock can benefit as economic uncertainty pushes consumers to shift spending from travel to the home. — CNBC’s Sarah Min, Alex Harring, Lisa Kailai Han and Michelle Fox contributed reporting.