Alibaba, Bitcoin, Exxon, Square: What to Watch When the Stock Market Opens Today

Here’s what we’re watching ahead of Thursday’s opening bell.

U.S. stock futures edged up, pointing to a muted recovery on Wall Street after worries about inflation pushed the S&P 500 to its biggest three-day loss since October.
Futures tied to the broad stocks gauge were up 0.2%. Contracts linked to the Dow Jones Industrial Average were flat. Nasdaq-100 futures rose 0.7% after tech stocks bore the brunt of Wednesday’s selloff.
Claims for jobless benefits, a proxy for layoffs, fell to 473,000 last week, from 507,000 the week before. That’s a pandemic low, and a sign hiring is poised to strengthen as soon as more workers return to the labor market.
Yields on 10-year Treasury notes edged down to 1.685% from 1.693% Wednesday. Read our full market wrap here.

Alibaba Group

BABA 1.66%

said a large fine imposed by the Chinese government under an anti-monopoly law led to a quarterly net loss. American depository receipts for the e-commerce company fell 2.8% ahead of the bell.
Bitcoin’s dollar value fell 6.3% to $49,837.41 after
Tesla

TSLA 3.16%

Chief Executive Elon Musk said the company has suspended accepting bitcoin as payment for its vehicles, citing concerns over its environmental impact. Tesla shares were up 1.6% premarket.
Shiba Inu coin, a joke on a joke named for the dog breed that is the dogecoin’s mascot, fell more than 40% after the co-creator of the Ethereum network donated 50.7 trillion Shiba Inu coin, then worth about $1 billion, to a Covid-19 relief fund.
Investors were unmoved by
Bumble

BMBL 5.78%

‘s first-quarter earnings. Shares of the dating-app operator ticked 0.8% higher ahead of the bell after sliding 6.7% Wednesday. With multiple public players now in the dating game, investors can afford to have high standards, writes Heard on the Street columnist Laura Forman.
Love rival
Match Group,

MTCH 2.74%

owner of dating app Tinder, gained 0.7%.

Photo:

mike segar/Reuters

A drop in crude-oil prices put energy stocks under pressure.
Occidental Petroleum

OXY 5.86%

slipped 1.4% and

Exxon Mobil

XOM 2.48%

shed 1.1%.
Jack in the Box

JACK 4.22%

dropped 3.6% premarket. The restaurant chain said same-store sales increased in the recent quarter and raised its dividend.
Essex Property Trust

ESS 0.16%

dropped 4% premarket. The apartment REIT declared its quarterly distributions after Wednesday’s close.

Bank of America and
JPMorgan

JPM 1.55%

Chase traded the first complex derivative using a Bloomberg index crafted to replace Libor, exchanging $250 million worth of an interest-rate swap earlier this month. The transaction marks a shift in efforts to move away from the troubled rate underpinning trillions of dollars in financial contracts.
Bitcoin mining consumes about 148 terawatt-hours of energy annually, the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance estimates. That is more than Sweden uses in a year.
On this day in 1999, Barbie went high-tech as Mattel acquired The Learning Co., a maker of educational software, for $3.51 billion. After only 16 months, Mattel sold The Learning Co. to Gores Technology Group for no cash up front, the assumption of The Learning Co.’s debt and an undisclosed percentage of its future profits. Mattel lost roughly $4 billion on the acquisition with nothing to show for it, making the deal one of the most disastrous in modern history.

Cathie Wood’s ARK Investment Management LLC is bearing the brunt of the stock market’s faltering technology trade, again. Ms. Wood was crowned a star stock picker last year thanks to her exchange-traded funds’ hefty exposure to work-from-home winners.