Stock market today: Stocks slip from recent records, Bitcoin rallies back above $70,000

The S&P 500 (^GSPC) fell about 0.3% while the the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) dipped 0.4%. The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) closed down 0.3% after the index set a record close on Friday.

Despite Monday's dip on the major averages, certain equities ended the trading day in green territory, though off their session highs.

Energy stocks (XLE) rose as oil futures continued to climb and Morgan Stanley analysts upgraded the sector to Overweight.

Boeing (BA) shares rose more than 1% after the plane manufacturer embroiled in a crisis surrounding safety issues announced CEO Dave Calhoun will step down at the end of the year.

Chipmaker Micron (MU) soared 6% to fresh highs while AI darling Nvidia (NVDA) gained less than 1%.

Cryptocurrency-related stocks like MicroStrategy (MSTR) and Coinbase Global (COIN) soared as bitcoin (BTC-USD) jumped above $70,000 for the first time since March 15.

Reddit (RDDT) shares popped nearly 30% on their third day of trading. The social media platform stock gained 48% on its first day of trading last Thursday. On Monday the stock closed just above $59 per share.

MicroStrategy (MSTR)

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) exposed stocks like MicroStrategy popped on Monday as the cryptocurrency rose above $70,500 per token. As of March 10, the enterprise software maker held 205,000 bitcoin tokens.

MicroStrategy stock rose 21% on Monday. Year to date, shares are up roughly 170%.

Bitcoin rose to all-time highs, just above $73,000, earlier this month. On Monday the cryptocurrency was up roughly 9%. The token trades around the clock, seven days a week.

Lucid (LCID)

Shares of Lucid jumped 7% after the EV maker announced a $1 billion investment from its majority stockholder, Ayar Third Investment Company, to buy newly created convertible preferred stocks.

Lucid stock is down more than 28% year to date amid a growth slowdown in the electric vehicle industry.

GameStop (GME)

GameStop stock gained 13% on Monday ahead of the video game retailer’s earnings release after the closing bell tomorrow. GME occupied the No. 3 trending ticker slot during Monday's afternoon trading.

Wall Street expects the company's fourth quarter net sales to come in at $2.06 billion. Adjusted earnings per share are estimated at $0.30.

Year to date, GameStop stock is down about 11%.

The market's current outlook for interest rate cuts this year is a familiar one. After investors aggressively priced in expectations for more than six interest rate cuts following the December Fed meeting, expectations have once again scaled back.

As seen in the chart below, investor pricing tracked by Bloomberg now shows a similar path to what was seen following the November meaning.

But this comes with an important caveat: The overall outlook for both stocks and the economy has changed since then. As highlighted by the Fed's upward revisions for economic growth in last week's Summary of Economic Projections, consensus now expects the US economy to grow more than initially expected in 2024. This in and of itself would be a welcome sign for stocks.

Add in an underlying trend that earnings have come in stronger than expected and that growth is expected to continue throughout the rest of this year, and this shifting backdrop helps explain why stocks have continued to rally despite a shift in Fed rate cut expectations over the past month.

"Results from 4Q earnings season were better than feared and 2024 bottom-up EPS estimates have increased by 0.1% to $243 (+9% year-over-year) in the last month," Goldman Sachs chief US equity strategist David Kostin wrote in a note to clients on Friday. "[2025] EPS revision sentiment, which measures the share of positive revisions to negative revisions, is back in positive territory."

Gold’s (GC=F) recent rally has room to grow with the precious metal poised to hit $2,300 an ounce by year-end, according to Goldman Sachs analysts.

On Monday futures rose to about $2,176 per ounce in afternoon trading. The precious metal is considered a safe haven during times of geopolitical tensions and when interest rates decrease. Last week, the Federal Reserve continued to signal that it would lower interest rates three times this year.

The Fed meeting “reinforced the market’s (and ours) expectations that three cuts are likely this year, lending renewed support to gold to test and surpass March’s earlier record high,” wrote a team of analysts led by Samantha Dart.

Goldman Sachs analysts upgraded their average gold price forecast for 2024 from $2,090 to $2,180 per ounce, targeting a move to $2,300 by the end of the year.

Read more here.

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) rebounded more than 9% over the past 24 hours, topping $70,000 per token on Monday.

Bitcoin fell to around $61,500 one week ago, after climbing to all-time record highs topping $73,000 earlier in March.

The cryptocurrency trades around the clock, seven days a week.

Oil- and gas-related stocks outperformed the rest of the market on Monday as the S&P 500 Energy Select ETF (XLE) rose more than 1%.

Morgan Stanley analysts upgraded the sector to Overweight citing "a combination of inflecting relative earnings revisions, strong breadth and compelling valuation."

"The recent stability of crude prices also points to a catch up in both relative performance and earnings growth, in our view," wrote Morgan Stanley's Michael Wilson and his team of analysts.

Crude oil futures continued their recent climb, jumping more than 1% on Monday. West Texas Intermediate (CL=F) and Brent (BZ=F), the international benchmark price, each traded around $82 and $86 per barrel, respectively, during the session.

"Energy stocks do trade with oil prices with approximately 70% correlation. Oil prices are up over 13% [year to date] so energy stocks have trailed oil prices," Jay Hatfield, CEO at Infrastructure Capital Advisors, told Yahoo Finance on Monday.

XLE is up 11.6% since the start of the year, making it the second-best-performing sector behind Communications Services.

Former President Trump’s social media company will start trading on the Nasdaq on Tuesday morning following the announcement of the merger completion with blank check company Digital World Acquisition, or DWAC.

The startup will trade under the ticker symbols DJT and DJTWW and continue to be headed by CEO Devin Nunes, the former congressman. The company called Trump Media & Technology Group operates the social media platform Truth Social.

As Yahoo Finance's Ben Werschkul recently reported, Donald Trump could net a $3 billion paper windfall in shares from the merger, though they are subject to a lock-up period. The potential proceeds come at a critical time for the Republican presidential candidate as he struggles with hundreds of millions in legal judgments and a 2024 campaign fundraising shortfall ahead of his rematch with President Joe Biden this fall.

Jen Schonberger reports:

Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said Monday that three rate cuts in 2024 are "in line with my thinking," and that the fundamental story about falling inflation has not changed despite hotter-than-expected readings in January and February.

"It seems hard for me to view that the seven months previous to the start of this year were just random," Goolsbee told Yahoo Finance Live in an exclusive interview.

"We're in an uncertain state, but it doesn't feel to me like we've changed fundamentally the story that we're getting back to target."

Read more here.

Disney (DIS) shares rose more than 2% on Monday following a fresh upgrade on Wall Street.

Barclays analyst Kannan Venkateshwar upgraded the stock to Overweight from Equal Weight and boosted his price target on shares to $135 from the prior $95. The move implies roughly 15% upside based on current trading levels of about $120 a share.

Venkateshwar argued better-than-expected free cash flow and earnings guidance, coupled with "tactical tailwinds" such as the Hollywood strikes, Hulu's consolidation, and cost cuts, have helped buoy investor confidence.

Meanwhile, "the propensity among media investors to be long Disney, has resulted in the stock outperforming broader markets meaningfully thus far this year, at a pace faster than we anticipated."

The stock has been on a tear since the start of the year, up more than 30% compared to the S&P 500's 10% rise over that same time period.

It's a significant turnaround for the company after its stock price hit multiyear lows last year.

The media giant has been grappling with challenges that include a declining linear TV business, slower growth in its parks business, and losses in its streaming business. A heated proxy battle with activist investor Nelson Peltz has also clouded the company's outlook.

But Venkateshwar argued Disney's next phase "may be more impactful as a number of turnaround elements still remain work in progress and may manifest more in numbers starting next year."

In his bull case, the analyst said sooner-than-expected streaming profitability could serve as a boon to the stock price.

"We expect Disney streaming to break even potentially a quarter or two earlier than company guidance of Q4 2024," he explained. "This is in part driven by the tailwinds from cost cuts over the last few quarters and recent price increases."

Venkateshwar said he believes Disney will likely achieve streaming margins "that are better than Netflix," estimating potential margins in the 25% to 30% range, "which is not too different from where linear margins today are."

Other "upside narrative surprises" could include ESPN's yet-to-be-announced streaming partners for its over-the-top service, set to debut sometime in fall 2025, in addition to a refocused attention on long-term succession plans post-proxy battle.

Goodbye to a failed leader.

As Yahoo Finance's Ines Ferre has been reporting all morning long in the blog, Boeing (BA) CEO Dave Calhoun is out by year-end. Calhoun's many failures are well documented — what is so head-scratching is that it took a plane door blowing out to get him shoved out of Boeing HQ for good.

Nonetheless, BofA analyst Ronald Epstein is first out of the gate with analysis on this one from the sell side:

"Given Calhoun's departure is set for the end of 2024, his successor will be assuming the tasks of addressing any further FAA required changes, overseeing the potential acquisition and subsequent integration of Spirit AeroSystems, and rebuilding trust with customers, investors, and travelers. Additionally, we would expect more board seats will likely turn-over, given new CEOs often come with their own brigade in support of their new vision. The new CEO will be coming into a Boeing which has been playing a reactionary defense for quite some time, however the best leaders are forged in fire. This may be the first real chance, in a long time, Boeing has had to clean-house and reset their own narrative. While we view the changes as a positive, uncertainties remain, and we reiterate our Neutral rating."

Selecting the next CEO of Boeing will be new chairman Steve Mollenkopf, the former CEO of Qualcomm (QCOM).

I got to know Steve a good bit when he led Qualcomm as CEO (first time we met was in 2016), and am a little surprised he is deciding to take on this borderline insane job.

Since retiring from Qualcomm in 2021, Steve has kept a low profile — which fits his style. Steve is methodical (reflects his engineering background), numbers- and strategy-oriented, and OK with not being a celebrity executive. Having said that, he is the same guy who battled hard to keep the Apple (AAPL) chip business and laid the groundwork for Qualcomm in 5G and the connected automobile. So Boeing isn't getting an operational slouch by any stretch of the imagination.

It will be fascinating to see the CEO search process Steve and the Boeing board run.

Wall Street has a new high-water mark for the S&P 500 (^GSPC).

Oppenheimer chief investment strategist John Stoltzfus now sees the benchmark index ending the year at 5,500, reflecting a roughly 5% increase from Friday's close. The call comes after a surge in stocks pushed the benchmark index past his initial target of 5,200 less than three months into the year.

Stoltzfus entered the year looking for one or two interest rate cuts, and to him, little has changed in that storyline since December as the Federal Reserve recently projected three interest rate cuts this year with a bias leaning toward the possibility of two cuts. He noted positive signs in earnings over the last several quarters, resilience in US economic growth, and a "capitulation" among the bearish community all support his upgrade to the S&P 500's performance.

"All of the above prompts us to increase our year-end price target acknowledging the possibility that we might need to raise the target price again later this year should this economic and market outlook prove us too conservative in our projections," Stoltzfus wrote.

Other analysts have recently raised their targets for the benchmark index. Earlier this month, Bank of America predicted the S&P would end the year at 5,400, matching a previous call from UBS.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and Intel (INTC) both fell on Monday morning after the Financial Times reported China would phase out the use of their chips and servers in government computers.

Shares of Intel declined more than 3%, dragging on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI), which fell 0.3%.

AMD stock dipped as much as 2% before paring back some of those losses during the first hour of trading.

Shares of rivals ARM (ARM) and Micron (MU) gained more than 5% on Monday morning.

Stocks opened lower on Monday to start out the last week of the month and quarter. The S&P 500 (^GSPC) fell 0.3% while the the Nasdaq Composite (^IXIC) declined 0.6%, led by a slide in technology stocks.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (^DJI) slipped 0.2%, dragged by shares of Intel (INTC), Microsoft (MSFT), and Apple (AAPL).

Boeing (BA) shares rose more than 3% after the plane manufacturer announced CEO Dave Calhoun will step down at the end of the year. The industrial giant is in the middle of a safety crisis that began in early January after a panel blew off a 737 MAX 9 plane during an Alaska Air flight.

Foot Locker (FL) has had a brutal 12 months.

Weak sales. Weak margins. Rough outlooks. The reasons for all of this are varied, from changing sneaker preferences (think more demand for chunky dad shoes as opposed to athletic sneakers) to Nike (NKE) execution issues to Foot Locker's own operational challenges.

All in, the stock is down 36% in the past year — and it's deserved (just take a look at the company's latest earnings presentation for support).

Despite this, Evercore ISI's Michael Binetti is tossing a dart at the stock rebounding. He upgraded his rating to Outperform this morning, citing:

• A new loyalty program launch by mid-year.

• A new digital app in North America by mid-year.

• An aggressive store refresh plan — two-thirds of Foot Locker stores to be updated by 2025.

• A significant acceleration in innovation/newness across all athletic brands.

• Nike pivoting back to growth ahead of the Olympics.

Appreciate the analysis, but FL remains a show-me story.

I still remember meeting Brian Niccol in 2016.

At the time, he was the CEO of Yum! Brands (YUM) owned Taco Bell. I was in my early 30s still trying to figure out a reporter role and also looking for ways to save money (in part because I wasn't making much in said role!) — that included eating dinner at Taco Bell.

I met Brian in a hotel conference room after he presented at an investor day. Despite being a young guy with a ton of success on his resume, I found Brian to be humble and insanely knowledgeable about the fast-food industry. I came away thinking Brian would be a game-changer as CEO of a stand-alone business.

Eight years later, Brian is still the same guy I met despite even more success on his resume as CEO of Chipotle (CMG). Here is my new exclusive chat with Brian now on Yahoo Finance. We touched on a lot in our 25-minute phone chat, but my main takeaway is that Chipotle shareholders remain in a good place because someone like Brian is at the helm backed up by the equally impressive CFO in Jack Hartung.

A couple of takeaways from the interview:

• Big focus by Chipotle on pushing it to the limit on new restaurant openings over the next three years.

• New tech will arrive to more Chipotle locations with an eye toward improving profit margins.

• Brian Niccol isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

As we enter the final week of trading in a relatively hot March for various asset classes, investors remain on bubble watch.

A new survey from Deutsche Bank that dropped this morning still shows investors perhaps worried about how fast bitcoin and tech stocks have come on.

Makes sense as tech stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA) has surged 19% this month on AI hype and bitcoin is up by 9%!