Today’s Waves – 9th September

Stock markets rise once again

After drops across the board for U.S. stock indices on Tuesday, markets were mostly in the green today.

Stocks rebounded on Wednesday with the tech centric NASDAQ rising by 3%, as a host of companies including Tesla, APPLE, and Microsoft led the way.  This came as markets mostly ignored news that AstraZeneca had paused tests of its coronavirus vaccine.

Shares in Tesla jumped 9.5% after losing about 15% in yesterday’s session, following the news that it was excluded from the S&P 500. The Dow Jones was up 2.4%, with the S&P 500 up over 2%,

U.S. Job vacancies increase, as more workers quit

Today it was reported that job openings in the United States increased in July, however this came as more workers quit their jobs due to uncertainty surrounding COVID-19.

Overall, it job openings jumped by 617,000 to 6.6 million. This announcement came as the Labor Department released its Job Openings and Labor Turnover, or JOLTS report. Job openings are now roughly 400,000 below the pre-pandemic level.

The report also showed that the number of people leaving their jobs had increased by 344,000 to 2.9 million in the same month. The majority of leavers were from the retail sector, with 152,000 workers quitting their jobs.

SoftBank loses $12 billion in market cap

After suffering huge losses in Uber, SoftBank’s tech woes continued this week as the Japanese holding company’s Vision Fund lost over $12 billion in value.

It was recently reported that SoftBank has been one of the biggest bulls in the recent rally in tech stocks, and had snapped up shares in major tech companies like Tesla, Amazon, Microsoft and Netflix,

However, the recent sell off in the NASDAQ, which saw the likes of Tesla drop 15% in value just yesterday, has hit the Japanese fund hard. Shares of the company fell by 3%