It was a choppy start to November as market participants looked ahead to a busy week of earnings reports and little sign that the government shutdown will end anytime soon. However, two of the three main indexes closed higher as Amazon.com (AMZN) kept climbing.
At the close, the S&P 500 was up 0.2% at 6,851 and the Nasdaq Composite had added 0.5% to 23,834. The Dow Jones Industrial Average, however, was down 0.5% at 47,336.
The next several sessions feature an onslaught of corporate earnings reports, with big data analytics firm Palantir Technologies (PLTR) included in the lineup. PLTR stock rose 3.4% ahead of its third-quarter results, due after Monday’s close, bringing its year-to-date return to 174%.
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While impressive, it’s actually Robinhood Markets (HOOD) that’s the best S&P 500 stock of the year, up 295% so far. The online trading platform will take its place on the earnings stage after Wednesday’s close.
Robinhood released September metrics that showed solid growth across the platform, which has Needham analyst John Todaro forecasting above-consensus earnings of 60 cents per share on revenue of $1.27 billion.
“We remain impressed with HOOD’s product expansion, and we see additional opportunities in banking, futures, tokenized RWA & prediction markets,” says Todaro, adding that he believes HOOD is “the farthest along” among financial services platforms to “becoming a ‘one-stop shop.'”
Amazon inks a $38 billion deal with OpenAI
Amazon jumped 4% – making it the best Dow Jones stock Monday – after OpenAI agreed to buy $38 billion worth of capacity from the company’s Amazon Web Services cloud segment.
According to the press release, OpenAI will utilize “hundreds of thousands of state-of-the-art” Nvidia (NVDA, +2.2%) artificial intelligence (AI) chips to run its workloads, “with the ability to expand to tens of millions of CPUs to rapidly scale agentic workloads.”
“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” said OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”
The partnership comes on the heels of Amazon’s blowout third-quarter earnings report, which sent the blue chip stock up nearly 10% on Friday.
Kenvue pops on $40 billion buyout bid
Kenvue (KVUE) soared 12.3% after Kimberly-Clark (KMB) agreed to buy the consumer products company, which was spun off from Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) in 2023, for $40 billion in cash and stock. KMB, meanwhile, slumped 14.6% to close at its lowest level since mid-2018.
“The proposed Kimberly-Clark acquisition offers immediate value of $3.50 cash per share plus participation in a larger health and wellness leader,” says CFRA Research analyst Ana Garcia, who has a Buy rating on Kenvue.
It’s been a tough few months for KVUE stock after President Donald Trump and Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., suggested in late September that there is a link between pregnant women taking products with acetaminophen, such as Kenvue’s Tylenol, and a child developing autism.
And while Kennedy said in late October that there is not “sufficient” evidence to support that claim, KVUE stock was still down more than 30% in the past three months heading into today’s session.
Factory activity cooled in October
This week’s economic calendar features several key updates, though it’s likely the October jobs report – initially scheduled for release ahead of Friday’s open – will be delayed amid the ongoing government shutdown.
This makes Wednesday morning’s ADP National Employment Report a key event that we’re watching. Wednesday also marks when the Supreme Court will begin hearing oral arguments on the legality of President Trump’s tariff policies.
Today, the Institute for Supply Management (ISM) said its Manufacturing Purchasing Managers Index (PMI) fell to 48.7 in October from September’s reading of 49.1. This marks the eighth straight month that factory activity has contracted, as indicated by a reading below 50.
“U.S. manufacturing has been in contraction mode for most of this year, with tariffs getting much of the blame, according to respondents in the survey,” says Priscilla Thiagamoorthy, senior economist at BMO Capital Markets. “Weakness in the factory sector is expected to persist, even as the broader economy continues to expand.”