A daily market update from FS Insight — what you need to know ahead of opening bell

“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.” — Eleanor Roosevelt

Overnight

Solar eclipse comes, goes, briefly eclipses people’s worries (WSJ)

Frequency of searches for Bonnie Tyler’s Total Eclipse of the Heart closely follows the path of totality (X)

Investment Association names JPMorgan AM’s Stephens ETF committee chair (IW)

Leading energy trader Vitol posts $13bn profits in second consecutive year of bumper results; closest rival Trafigura at net profit of $7.2bn (FT)

NFIB: Small business optimism hits lowest level since 2012 (FB)

Swiss National Bank vice chair Martin Schlegel speaks (FL)

U.S. Treasury sells $58 billion of 3-year notes (MW)

Offshore wind developer Ørsted leases brand-new A-Class wind farm installation vessel from Cadeler (GC)

4,240 titles given the Fahrenheit 454 treatment last year (WSJ)

Sixty-plus Wisconsin school districts, including Milwaukee Public Schools, pass referendums (BB)

Two U.S. Republican lawmakers warn that members of their party are repeating Moscow’s propaganda “on the House floor” (Semafor)

Oil prices top $90 on their way to $100, fed by fears of a prolonged Middle East conflict and improving global economic projects driving a broader commodities boom (Semafor)

Amid soaring housing prices, Spain scraps so-called golden visas for foreign investors spending €500,000 ($540,000) on real estate; Portugal, Ireland nixed similar programs last year (Semafor)

Archaeologists in England find a 3,000-year-old sacred site beneath the ruins of a medieval abbey (Semafor)

Ireland’s Parliament is expected to confirm Simon Harris as the country’s new, and youngest ever, leader (Semafor)

Citadel Securities moves data and algorithm testing to Google Cloud (FT)

Beauty group Puig looks to raise €2.5bn in IPO (FT)

Tesla settles with Apple engineer’s family who said Autopilot caused his fatal crash (CNN)

An mRNA drug for propionic acidaemia, a rare genetic disorder, showed promise in early clinical trials (Semafor)

Chechnya (Russian Federation) bans songs judged too fast/slow, in attempt to quash Western influences; ironically, the Russian national anthem is, at 76 BPM, too slow (Semafor)

60% of millennials said they helped a stranger in the past month, up from ~50% pre-pandemic (Semafor)

The U.S. has more honeybees than ever before, despite widespread coverage of ‘colony collapse’. (Semafor)

First news

• A competitor to Neuralink launches, but it’s not yet on the level
• Chainalysis is the target of much dry powder at a discounted valuation
• Jamie Dimon all in on AI for JPM
• Zimbabwe launches yet another attempt at a currency
• In the post-Nvidia age, money managers seek emerging AI bargains in emerging markets.

Chart of the Day

MARKET LEVELS

MORNING INSIGHT

Good morning!

Here are five reasons we are buying this “inflation-fear” 2-day dip.

Wed. could be the turning-higher date.

Click HERE for more.

TECHNICAL

Recent churning has proven to be a source of frustration for Bulls and Bears alike, but U.S. stock indices remain attractive and the path of least resistance continues to be higher.

Large-cap Technology’s recent slide hasn’t adversely affected SPX or QQQ, and both achieved a greater than a 10% rise for the 1^st Quarter despite some underperformance out of the “Magnificent 7”.

This week’s CPI report might serve as a catalyst for helping SPX break back higher out of its recent range; for now, the recent sector rotation is seen as being a bigger positive for indices than the minor consolidation having played out within the Technology space.

Click HERE for more.

CRYPTO

The dYdX Chain has been suffering from a network outage that started early this morning as a result of its version 4.0.0 upgrade. The development team has confirmed the chain has been halted and has posed a potential fix. The fix recommends using a snapshot at a post-upgrade block and running the v4.0.2 software to fix the state corruption issue. They also advised anyone running a validator node to contact its operations team to assist with recovery instructions. The team expects the issue to be resolved within the next few hours. dYdX Chain went live on mainnet in October and this is the first major technical issue they have run into. Factoring in today’s halt, the dYdX chain has 96.11% uptime in the last 90 days, according to dYdX’s status page. The DYDX token has been unphased during the outage, gaining 3.11% today despite the issues.

1inch, a popular DEX aggregator, has revealed a new crypto debit card in conjunction with Baanx and Mastercard. The 1inch Card will enable users to pay for online and in-person purchases using their crypto balances and make ATM withdrawals. 1inch knows many crypto holders use its products for swaps but recognizes that they can tap into users’ daily lives by enhancing the real-world utility of digital assets. The 1inch Card leverages Mastercard’s payment network, making the crypto payments available at any of the 160 million merchants within the Mastercard network. Traditional payment providers like Mastercard and Visa continue to explore the Web3 space as crypto payments remain a largely untapped sector, and blockchains can improve upon their existing infrastructure. Users within the UK and EEA can add themselves to the early access waitlist to be among the first users to get their hands on the new card.

Click HERE for more.

FIRST NEWS

Elon Musk Not Yet Quaking in Boots. As advancements in microchips and artificial intelligence continue, the possibility of people controlling computers through thought alone is becoming more realistic, according to Brian Otis, ex-CTO of Alphabet’s Verily life-sciences unit, who recently became CTO of Precision Neuroscience. Launched in 2021 by a team of founders that includes Ben Rapoport, a co-founder of Neuralink, the company has raised $53 million from investors such as B Capital, Forepoint, and Mubadala, and is developing a compact device that sits on the surface of the brain and can analyze the electrical signals inside. Sophisticated machine-learning algorithms then interpret the data, attempting to discern the user’s intent. This could allow people to control software without physically moving their body. So far, about a dozen people have tested the Precision device as the company gathers data, though none have yet used it to control a computer. The Information

No More Paralysis. Just before the crypto market collapsed and venture deals slowed dramatically, Haun Ventures raised $1.5 billion to invest in cryptocurrency startups. Now, as the crypto market shows signs of recovery, Haun Ventures is bringing that dry powder to bear. The venture capital firm, founded in 2022 by former federal prosecutor and Andreessen Horowitz investor Katie Haun, has been quietly acquiring stakes in Chainalysis, one of the crypto industry’s most prominent survivors. Haun Ventures has been purchasing shares from existing Chainalysis investors at a price that implies a valuation of $2.5 billion for the blockchain analytics company. This represents a steep discount (~70%) from the $8.6 billion valuation Chainalysis secured when raising funding two years ago. The Information

AI Just the Thing for JD at JP. In his annual letter to shareholders, released Monday, Jamie Dimon touched on inflation, geopolitics, social media, and the bank’s First Republic deal, but reserved the comments calculated to resound the loudest for artificial intelligence, saying he was convinced that AI would profoundly change society, possibly having as much of an impact on humanity as the printing press, electricity, and computers.

Dimon first mentioned AI in his annual letter in 2017. Today, JPMorgan has more than 2,000 AI and machine-learning employees and data scientists working on 400 applications including fraud detection, marketing, and risk controls. The bank is also exploring the use of generative AI in software engineering, customer service, and efforts to boost employee productivity.

The technology could ultimately touch all of the bank’s roughly 310,000 employees, assisting some workers while replacing others, and forcing the company to retrain workers for new roles. “Over time, we anticipate that our use of AI has the potential to augment virtually every job, as well as impact our workforce composition,” Dimon said. “It may reduce certain job categories or roles, but it may create others as well.” CNBC

Sixth Time’s the Charm. Zimbabwe’s sixth attempt at a revamped currency yields the ZiG, as the stock exchange rebases share prices to reflect the new legal tender and a parallel market is cut off as banks and mobile money switch over their systems.

The ZiG, Zimbabwe’s new currency, began trading on Monday as businesses struggled with yet attempt at introducing a revamped unit of money. Reserve Bank Governor John Mushayavanhu set the introductory exchange rate of 13.56 per U.S. dollar for the ZiG, short for Zimbabwe Gold, with the daily exchange to be determined in the interbank market from now on. Bloomberg 

Emerging in Every Sense. As the world expresses its fondest hopes for the future of AI in the form of driving up the price of Nvidia stock in a three-fold surge and a 50% jump in a key U.S. index for semiconductor manufacturers in less than a year, investors are looking to emerging markets for what they see as better value and a larger pool of options. After the Nvidia frenzy, investors believe they have reason to seek better value outside the U.S., searching for ‘low-hanging fruit’ AI winners across emerging markets, especially in developing countries. Some of the world’s biggest money managers wish to ferret out the next wave of artificial intelligence winners beyond the U.S. Bloomberg