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Greetings! Is your seatbelt still holding? Monday's ups and downs in the stock market would be enough to give anyone whiplash. The good news, for tech investors at least, is that things weren't all bad. Quite a few stocks went up, including Nvidia, Amazon, Meta Platforms and Broadcom. The biggest losers included Apple, down 3.7%, and Tesla, down 2.6%, which as sellers of actual stuff—phones and cars—are more obviously exposed to tariffs. (Check out this report that Apple flew several planeloads of iPhones from India to the U.S. last month to beat the tariffs!) It's not the case, as Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent claimed on Friday, that the market plunge was a "Mag 7" problem, a reference to the "Magnificent 7" label for the biggest tech stocks. The sell-off has been much more concentrated than that. In the past week, Apple stock has dropped 18%, while Microsoft and Google dropped closer to 5%, according to Koyfin data. Amazon is down 7.8%. All of them have outperformed the broader market, as measured by the S&P 500, which is off 9.8% for the past week. In fact, if a retiree wanted stability in their portfolio for these trying times, Microsoft is probably a good bet. It hasn't soared as much as other big names in recent years, rising only 12% last year, for instance, while Apple, Alphabet and Amazon each rose 30% or more. But it has held up better this year than most other big tech names, likely thanks to its wide diversity of businesses (it sells cloud services, software, devices, videogames and advertising). A handful of tech stocks have done better than Microsoft. One is Netflix, whose stock rallied a bit today—it's only down 7% in the past week and 2.6% for the year. That makes sense: In a recession, which economists think is on the horizon, relatively inexpensive sources of entertainment at home are worth their weight in gold. Then there's Meta, which has been a tech favorite for a few months now, for debatable reasons. It rallied today and is only down 12% for the year—although it lost most of that ground just last week. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, whose business is always vital, also rallied today and is only off 5% for the year. Still, these performances are few and far between. Strategy, the bitcoin holding firm once known as MicroStrategy, is paying the price for its relentless buying of the crypto currency. It laid out $7.7 billion to buy more bitcoin in the first quarter, at an average price of just under $95,000. In contrast, bitcoin was trading late Monday at around $79,000. Ouch. What drew headlines on Monday, however, was the company's disclosure that it suffered a theoretical loss on crypto of $5.9 billion in the first quarter, which means it will report a net loss during earnings season in a few weeks. That's a result of its adoption of a new accounting rule, requiring Strategy to write up or down the value of its crypto holdings in its profit statement every quarter, depending on the price. That ensures lots of volatility. Things could be worse. While its pricey purchases in the first quarter raised its average price for all its bitcoin, Strategy is still in the black overall. Its average purchase price per bitcoin is $67,458 as of the end of March 31. That's a huge increase from the end of 2023, when its average buying price was $31,168. - Nvidia has completed its acquisition of Lepton AI, a two-year-old startup that rents out servers powered by Nvidia's artificial intelligence chips, according to a person close to the startup.
- OpenAI in recent weeks discussed acquiring a startup its CEO, Sam Altman, has been working on with ex-Apple designer Jony Ive's studio, which is developing an AI-powered personal device, The Information reported.
- Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke is requiring teams to prove that AI tools can't carry out their work before they receive more budget or head count, according to a memo he posted on X Monday.
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