Wall Street
US stocks ended the week higher with the Dow Jones, Nasdaq 100 and S&P 500 reaching new record highs.
The investor optimism was mainly driven by the retail sales and weekly jobless claims data which signalled an accelerating recovery in the US economy according to Bloomberg.
Corporate earnings also helped to boost optimism about economic recovery as Goldman Sachs Group and JPMorgan Chase announced their financial results that showed a positive economic outlook.
US Stocks Major Deals
Chairman and CEO of Coinbase Global Inc sold 749,999 shares of Coinbase on 04/14/2021 at an average price of $389.1 a share. The total sale was $291.8 million.
Reuters reported that Cathie Wood’s ARK funds also bought more shares of cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase Global Inc COIN on Friday while selling shares of electric carmaker Tesla TSLA.O, according to the firm’s daily trade summary.
ARK on Friday bought 187,078 shares of Coinbase, which debuted on the Nasdaq earlier this week, in a purchase worth nearly $64 million at the day’s closing price of $342.
It sold 134,541 shares of Tesla, valued at $99.5 million at Friday’s close. Tesla is still by far the firm’s biggest position by value on its major funds.
Squarespace Listing
Squarespace, which builds software for people to make websites, on Friday filed to go public via a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol “SQSP.
According to CNBC, the company reported $621.1 million in revenue in 2020, up 28% year over year. Squarespace was founded in 2003 and is based in New York, with 1,256 employees at the end of 2020.
SpaceX wins $2.9 Billion contract to take man to moon
Elon Musk’s company SpaceX won a $2.9 billion contract from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) to fly human astronauts to the moon for the first time since the last Apollo mission in 1972.
The Washington Post reported on Friday that NASA had chosen SpaceX alone for the mission, after considering various combinations of work of several companies, including Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin, which partnered with Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Draper, as well as a defense contractor Dynetics.
SpaceX will launch the mission as part of its Artemis program, for which the company has designed reusable Starship spacecraft, intended to carry people deep into space and then safely land back on Earth. So far, all tested prototypes crashed, but Musk is hoping to have one of the spacecraft make it to orbit this year.
China’s GDP up 18.3% in first quarter
China’s gross domestic product (GDP) surged 18.3% in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period last year, the National Bureau of Statistics of China said on Friday. Compared to the previous quarter, the GDP grew by 0.6%.
The office attributed the yearly GDP growth to “the low base figure of last year and increase of working days due to staff staying put during the Spring Festival.” Meanwhile, the monthly rise “demonstrated a steady recovery of the national economy.”
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Global Markets; Coinbase & Grab Listing, ByteDance IPO, J&J Vaccine Halt
