Global News

[ad_1] The extraordinary activist-investor interest in Salesforce (CRM) eased further in the second quarter, according to the latest regulatory filings from influential Wall Street pros. These big-name investors also made moves in nine other Club stocks during a strong three-month stretch that ended the best first half for the market in years. Starting with Salesforce, Dan Loeb's Third Point shed its stake in the second quarter. Jeff Smith's Starboard Value — the first known activist to target the enterprise software giant — cut its stake by 21% in the three months ended June 30. Those sales are among the Club-related trades revealed this week by the latest batch of securities filings known as 13Fs. Submitted to U.S. regulators on a quarterly basis, these disclosures offer a look — albeit with some limitations — into the investment decisions that closely followed Wall Street pros have made. CRM .SPX YTD mountain Salesforce's year-to-date stock performance, in compariso

[ad_1] Exchange-traded funds can still compete in today's "stock picker's" market, according to a top investor. "A lot of money is moving into active ETFs, because it provides the benefits that you have from active management [or] from stock picking … but also all the tax benefits and cost benefits that you have in an ETF," Avantis Investors Chief Investment Officer Eduardo Repetto told CNBC's " ETF Edge " last week. He predicts actively managed ETFs will continue to gain traction through the second half of the year. "We used to only have index ETFs," Repetto noted. However, he emphasized this has changed over the past three years as the number of actively managed ETFs has grown. Repetto's firm is behind the Avantis U.S. Equity ETF , an actively managed portfolio of U.S. stocks. Its website shows the fund's top holdings are Apple, Microsoft , Amazon , Meta Platforms and Alphabet . As of Friday, the ETF is up 12% this ye

[ad_1] Traders on the floor of the NYSE, Oct. 21, 2022. Source: NYSE Stocks rose Friday as strong earnings results from some of the biggest banks and companies kicked off earnings season. The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 121 points, or 0.3%. The S&P 500 ticked up about 0.1%, and the Nasdaq Composite advanced 0.2%. Wall Street is coming off its fourth consecutive day of gains, with the Nasdaq and S&P 500 reaching their highest levels since April 2022. JPMorgan Chase rose 0.3% after its second-quarter earnings topped expectations. The bank was boosted by higher interest rates and rising interest income. Wells Fargo also gained 0.5% on the back of better-than-expected results. UnitedHealth shares jumped 8% after the insurance giant reported better-than-expected earnings and revenue. The company also raised the lower end of its full-year earnings guidance. "What we've seen simple out of out of big bank earnings, especially JPMorgan, is pretty resilient,&qu

[ad_1] A man wearing a mask walks past a Nvidia logo in Taipei, Taiwan. Sopa Images | Lightrocket | Getty Images Chipmaker Nvidia will invest $50 million in Recursion Pharmaceuticals to speed up the development of the biotech firm's artificial intelligence models for drug discovery, the companies said Wednesday.  Recursion's stock soared 80% following the announcement. Shares of Nvidia, which have helped fuel stock market gains this year amid hopes about its AI computing chips , rose more than 2%.  Recursion uses AI-powered models to identify and design new therapies, and offers those models to other drugmakers, including Roche and Bayer. Salt Lake City, Utah-based Recursion will use its biological and chemical datasets exceeding 23,000 terabytes to train its AI models on Nvidia's cloud platform. AI models usually require vast amounts of data, typically measured in terabytes, to train them. Nvidia can then potentially license those AI models on BioNeMo, the compan

[ad_1] Google was working on an AI-powered mobile chatbot app for Gen Z users that features interactive digital characters, CNBC has learned. However, the company recently "deprioritized" those efforts amid an internal reorganization, according to materials seen by CNBC. Typically, when a product is deprioritized at Google, work on it ceases. Called "Bubble Characters," the app featured a choice of a talking digital character that would interact in conversations with Gen Z users, according to internal documentation viewed by CNBC. The company had been working on it since Q4 2021. Google declined comment to CNBC. The app's description states that it featured "human-like" conversations that "take action" and are "interesting for GenZ." The conversations were powered by large language models, which are massive data sets used to understand and generate human-like text. "What started out as something from a science fiction nov

[ad_1] Amazon CEO Andy Jassy doesn't believe the retail and cloud computing giant should be counted out of the artificial intelligence race just yet. In a wide-ranging interview with CNBC, Jassy challenged the notion that Amazon has fallen behind in AI as Microsoft and Google add chatbots to consumer products like their search engines, likening it to the "hype cycle" before the "substance cycle." "I think most people are focused on the applications, you know, things like ChatGPT brought everybody's awareness up, but I think of generative AI as having three macro layers," Jassy told Jon Fortt in an interview that aired on "Closing Bell Overtime" late Thursday. "I think they're all really big and important." Jassy has said Amazon intends to invest in AI across the company, and that AI programs have the potential to improve "virtually every customer experience." But he specifically pointed to Amazon Web Servi