Stocks closed higher Monday as investors looked ahead to U.S. inflation data later in the week and pondered what influence the consumer price index and producer price index readings will have on monetary policy from the Federal Reserve.
These stocks made moves Monday:
Tesla
(ticker: TSLA) rose 10% to $273.58 after shares of the electric-vehicle maker were upgraded to Buy from Hold by Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas, who also boosted the stock’s price target to a Wall Street high of $400 a share, up from $250. The upgrade centers on artificial intelligence with Jonas writing that
Tesla
“has developed an advanced supercomputing architecture that pushes new boundaries in custom silicon and may put Tesla at an asymmetric advantage in a $10 trillion total addressable market.”
Qualcomm
(QCOM) jumped 3.9% after the semiconductor company extended an agreement to make modem chips for
Apple
‘s iPhones through to 2026.
Disney
(DIS) and
Charter Communications
(CHTR) said they reached an agreement that will restore popular channels including ESPN and ABC to the cable operator’s nearly 15 million subscribers. This draws to a close a blackout that lasted for more than a week.
Disney
shares gained 1.2%, while Charter stock jumped 3.2%.
Carvana
(CVNA) rose 6.8% after S&P Global Ratings upgraded its credit rating on the user-car seller to CCC+ from D.
J.M. Smucker
(
SJM
), the food company famous for jams and jellies, reached an agreement to buy
Hostess Brands
(TWNK) for about $5.6 billion, or $34.25 a share. The deal represents a roughly 54% premium to the stock’s closing price on Aug. 24, which was the last trading day before the reports about the possibility of a deal. Hostess Brands surged 19% to $33.49. Smucker shares dropped 7%.
RTX
(RTX), the aerospace and defense company formally known as
Raytheon Technologies,
dropped 7.9% after lowering its sales guidance due to a “rare condition in powder metal used to manufacture certain engine parts.”
Kenvue
(KVUE) was up 3.6% to $22.06. Shares of the company, which sells such products as Band-Aid, Listerine, Neutrogena, and Tylenol, were upgraded to Buy from Hold at
Deutsche Bank
and the price target was left unchanged at $27.
Meta Platforms
(META), the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, is working on a new artificial-intelligence system intended to be as powerful as the most advanced model offered by OpenAI, the Wall Street Journal reported.
Meta
aims for the new AI model to be ready next year, according to the Journal, which cited people familiar with the matter. Meta shares rose 3.3%.
American depositary receipts of
Alibaba
(BABA) fell 1.5%. Hong-Kong listed shares of
Alibaba
declined 3% after Daniel Zhang, former chairman of the e-commerce giant, stepped down as chairman and chief executive of its cloud business unit. Alibaba is aiming for a public listing of its cloud unit, the company’s second-largest business by revenue.
Apple
(AAPL) shares rose 0.7% a day before the tech giant’s annual fall launch event, dubbed “Wonderlust” this year. The event is expected to focus on the debut of the iPhone 15. The most notable change to the phone likely will be a shift to the widely used USB-C standard port from Apple’s proprietary Lightning connectors.
Alphabet
(GOOGL) gained 0.4% as the Department of Justice finally will bring its three-year-old antitrust case against Google to trial beginning Tuesday. The DOJ argues the
Alphabet
unit has an illegal monopoly in the internet search market.
Write to Joe Woelfel at [email protected] and Emily Dattilo at [email protected]
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