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Stocks edged higher in afternoon trading on Wall Street Thursday and are hovering around record highs amid rallies for big technology stocks. The S&P 500 rose 0.2% and is just below the record high it set on Monday. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 96 points, or 0.2%, as of 1:38 p.m. Eastern. The technology-heavy Nasdaq jumped 0.5% and is on track for a record. The technology sector did the heavy lifting for the broader market following results from big companies showcasing advancements in artificial intelligence. Roughly 70% of stocks in the S&P 500 were losing ground, but big technology stocks with hefty values helped offset losses elsewhere. Facebook and Instagram’s parent company Meta Platforms surged 11.9% after it crushed Wall Street’s sales and profit targets even as the company continues to pour billions into artificial intelligence. Microsoft jumped 4.1% after also posting better results than analysts expected. Microsoft also gave investors an encouraging update on its Azure cloud computing platform, which is a centerpiece of the company’s artificial intelligence efforts. Fellow technology giants Apple and Amazon will report their results after the closing bell. Big Tech companies have regularly been the driving force behind much of the market’s gains over enthusiasm for the future of artificial intelligence. Earnings remained a key focus outside of the technology sector in what has been a heavy week so far for corporate financial results. CVS Health rose 1.4% after it topped Wall Street expectations for the second quarter and raised its full-year forecast again. Wall Street is also monitoring the latest economic data, which included an update on inflation. The Commerce Department said prices rose 2.6% in June compared with a year ago, as measured by the personal consumption expenditures index. That’s the Federal Reserve’s preferred measure for inflation. The latest reading was slightly higher than economists expected and also marks an increase from an annual pace of 2.4% in May. Results from another measure of inflation earlier this month, the consumer price index, also showed inflation rising in June. Also on Thursday, a report showed that the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits inched up last week. The latest updates on inflation and the jobs market are landing amid lingering concerns about the impact of tariffs. Inflation’s temperature is being closely monitored by businesses and the Fed to better gauge the impact of President Donald Trumps on-again-off-again approach to import taxes. Companies including Ford and Hersheys have more recently warned that tariffs are weighing on their latest and projected financial results. Trump has said he will levy tariffs against goods from dozens of countries if they dont reach agreements with the U.S. by Friday. The latest developments in the seemingly unpredictable tariff landscape include a potential pause in tariff escalations with China and a deal with South Korea. The reasons behind trade policy decisions remain unpredictable. Trump, on Wednesday, signed an executive order to impose his threatened 50% tariffs on Brazil. He has directly linked the import tax to the trial of his ally, the countrys former president Jair Bolsonaro. He has also said that trade negotiations with Canada would be more difficult in the wake of that nation’s economically unrelated decision to recognize a Palestinian state. Uncertainty over tariffs and inflation have prompted the Fed to leave its benchmark interest rate alone through the central bank’s past five meetings, including the one that ended Wednesday. The Fed has been trying to cool the rate of inflation back to its target of 2%. It has come close, but inflation remains stubbornly stuck just above that target. A cut in rates would give the job market and overall economy a boost, but it could also risk fueling inflation. Fed Chair Jerome Powell has been pressured by Trump to cut the benchmark rate, though that decision isn’t his to make alone, but belongs to the 12 members of the Federal Open Market Committee. Inflation is only a bit above the Feds target, but looks likely to rise in the second half of the year due to tariffs,” said by Bill Adams, chief economist for Comerica Bank. With the job market in pretty good shape, they see room to hold interest rates steady and lean against inflations increase near-term. Wall Street has been tempering their expectations for rate cuts at the Fed’s next meeting in September. Traders now see a 39% chance of a rate cut, according to data from CME Group. That’s down from 58.4% a week ago and a 75.4% chance a month ago. Treasury yields held steady in the bond market. The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 4.34% from 4.37% late Wednesday. The yield on the two-year Treasury remained at 3.94% from late Wednesday. Markets were mostly mixed in Asia and Europe. Damian J. Troise, Teresa Cerojano, and Matt Ott, Associated Press
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E-Commerce
Figma Inc.’s IPO is one of the most talked-about public offerings in tech this year, and its happening today. A few people stand to make a lot of moneyincluding cofounder and CEO Dylan Field, as well as a number of big venture capital investors. Figma, a collaborative design software platform, provides a suite of online design tools for designers to craft user interfaces (UIs) for websites and apps, which are popular with Fortune 500 companies. The tools are used by a host of businesses, from Microsoft to Zoom. Heres a look at how much some of the principal players could take home as the company IPOs. First, how is the Figma IPO going? On Wednesday, Figma Inc. priced the IPO at $33 a share. On Thursday, shares opened at almost triple their initial public offering price on Thursday, at $85 on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE:FIG), which valued the company at about $50 billion. That valuation greatly exceeds a previous $20 billion buyout attempt from Adobe that fell apart in 2023. Trading was halted after shares quickly rose above $112. Figma IPO payout: Field, Wallace biggest winners One of the biggest winners of this listing is Figma’s cofounder, 33-year-old Dylan Field, who is now worth an estimated $1.8 billion, but as Forbes noted, this could be just the beginning of his payout; he could get another $1.3 billion in stock if the stock hits $130 per share. Based on the IPO price, Field’s cofounder Evan Wallace would be worth an estimated $1.3 billion, but he donated a third of his shares to the anti-homeless nonprofit Marin Community Foundation, per Axios. (Wallace left the company in 2021.) Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, Kleiner Perkins sell shares The IPO enables existing shareholders to sell more shares than expected at a higher ratio; and Figmas biggest venture investors are cashing in. Bloomberg reported the company sold 12.47 million shares in the IPO while investors including Index Ventures, Greylock Partners, and Kleiner Perkins sold 24.46 million shares at a market value of $16.1 billion, based on the outstanding shares listed in its filings. With employee stock options and restricted stock units, the company has a fully diluted value of about $18.5 billion. According to Venture Capital Journal, the biggest winner here would be Index Ventures, which holds 62.57 million shares, which at the opening price of $85, are worth $5.3 billion. The Journal reported that in all, the VCs stand to make more than $6 billion even at conservative estimates. Figma by the numbers As Fast Company previously reported, Figma reported $228.2 million in revenue for the first three months of 2025, according to its SEC filings. The company reported $749 million in revenue in 2024, an increase of 48% year-over-year. The design software maker has 13 million monthly active users.
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E-Commerce
Major League Baseball is getting creative to bring new fans into the game. The leagues experimentation will result in a lot of firsts this weekend, with a special game hosted at an iconic NASCAR track in Tennessee. The event, dubbed the MLB Speedway Classic, will mark the first MLB game ever played in the state and its already smashed a league attendance record, topping 85,000 tickets sold. The previous record of 84,587 was set during a 1954 New York Yankees game at Cleveland Stadium. Hosted at a pop-up baseball diamond elaborately built into Bristol Motor Speedway, the game will showcase the Atlanta Braves taking on the Cincinnati Reds on Saturday night. Everything about the event is designed to maximize hype, from a nostalgic first pitch featuring two Hall of Famers to accompanying performances from Tim McGraw, Pitbull and Jake Owen and a flurry of NASCAR-related brand activations. The Bristol game isnt the MLBs first special high profile event designed to open the game to potential new fans. Last year, the league introduced a tribute to Black baseball history with the East-West Classic, which returned last month to Birmingham, Alabamas historic Rickwood Field, former home of Willie Mays and the Negro Leagues Black Barons. The MLB has also rewarded its Japanese fans and tapped into Shohei Ohtani fever by kicking off its regular season with a pair of games between the Dodgers and the Cubs played in Tokyo. The series set records as the most-watched MLB games in Japans history. Once the most popular American sport, baseball has slumped in recent decades. Baseballs fanbase has stagnated compared to the explosive growth of the NFL. Younger viewers are looking beyond traditional sports for entertainment. Well aware of those trends, the MLB is mixing things up to get the sport growing again including playing on converted NASCAR tracks. The league is also testing out robot umpires, giving star players the anime treatment and even changing up the rules altogether. The MLB introduced a set of tweaks over the last few years designed to speed up games. Foremost among them was a shorter pitch timer, but the league also made bases bigger to encourage steal attempts and widened runners lanes. The barrage of small changes was designed to make the famously plodding sport faster and more dynamic, and the experiment seems to be working: Last year, the average duration of an MLB game dropped down to two hours, 36 minutes 28 minutes shorter than the 2022 average, making for the quickest games since 1985. You have to continue to capture the next generation, or it is an existential threat to the sport, MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred told the Los Angeles Times last year. As much as we love the thought that we are the national pastime, I think resting on your laurels is a really bad business strategy.
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E-Commerce
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