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“I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.” – Bill Gates

Morning stock market summary

Below is a snippet of commentary from today’s Morning Lineup. Start a two-week trial to Bespoke Premium to view the full report.  

While the S&P 500, Nasdaq, and Russell 2000 all managed to post gains yesterday, the DJIA closed lower for its third day in a row.  That streak may come to an end today, though, as futures are higher across the board. The only notable data point of the morning was jobless claims. Initial claims came in higher than expected (221K vs 214K) and hit the highest level since late January while continuing claims fell back below 1.8 million versus forecasts for a reading just above that level (1.791 mln vs 1.810 mln). Besides the employment data ahead of tomorrow’s jobs report, there are also a ton of Fed speakers on the calendar today, so by the end of the day we should have a much better idea of the prospects of a June rate cut, which currently stands at just about a coin flip.

Happy Birthday to the “Blue Screen of Death”.  The world’s largest company, Microsoft (MSFT), turns 49 years old today as it was founded on this day in 1975 in Albuquerque, NM by Paul Allen and Bill Gates.  Of the six US publicly traded companies with trillion-dollar market caps, MSFT is the oldest followed by Apple (AAPL) which was founded nearly two years to the day later. The chart below of the Nasdaq shows the dates that each member of the trillion-dollar club was founded.

It’s interesting to note that not even one of the largest US companies is 50 years old. The youngest of the six is Meta Platforms (META), but it won’t be legal to toast its membership for another ten months as it only turned twenty two months ago. People will tell you that while the 1980s were a lot of fun, not much good came out of them, and that’s also the case with the largest companies. After AAPL was founded in 1976, there was a 17-year lull before the next member, Nvidia (NVDA), was founded in 1993.  Just over a year after that, Amazon.com (AMZN) was founded in 1994. That was the same year that Katie Couric, Bryant Gumble, and Elizabeth Vargas asked each other, “What is internet?”.  Look who’s laughing now!

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